Well, actually pushes glasses up the nose Gewürztraminer is Savagnin Rosé. From the DNA point of view they are identical - the only thing is that Gewürztraminer is a musque mutation of Savagnin Rosé.
The only thing that is weird here is why the Kiwi vignerons call their Savagnin Rosé “Gewürztraminer” if there is no “würz” there? It’s just Traminer/Savagnin if it’s not an aromatic mutation!
Otto breaks the wine geek internet!!! 
Otto, you’r exactly right (even though if their is a mutation the DNA is not 100% identical, just pushing the boundaries of splitting hairs here 
), just an aromatic mutation, that’s why the nurseryman mistook one for the other I guess. Or maybe he thought his kiwi customer wouldn’t realise the difference (which he didn’t)…
“Savagnin rosé” is not exactly an easy brand to sell so I believe that he kept selling it as Gewürztraminer.
Thanks Marck, will let you know for sure if that happen! Don’t sit on your sake for too long, Japanese ppl tend to offer prestigious sake (ginjo/daiginjo) and the most common version of those don’t age too well. But maybe you already know that.
Thanks Nathan, David and Eben are wonderful ppl, I’l try to tell you more about our “Charleston” cuvée soon.
Gautier
Really? I haven’t seen those wines in the market. The only time I saw it listed in an NC book it was an older vintage and they are a big distributor that I didn’t do business and don’t trust their storage of wine so didn’t bother. A NC ABC brand search shows nada and that usually shows even wines where that were once registered but are no longer in the market (they show as “Inactive”).
I’d love to track them down in the event that we are able to re-open the restaurant post COVID.
That is true as well, but from what I’ve understood the differences such as musqué mutation (Traminer vs. Gewürztraminer) or lack of pigmentation (Pinot Noir vs. Pinot Blanc, or Grenache vs. Grenache Blanc) are so minuscule that you can’t tell the two varieties apart from each other and their DNAs appear identical. It’s like the DNA of an identical sibling: it is not actually 100% identical, only at the level of - just like you said - splitting hairs.
I hope I didn’t! If I did, I’d that’d happen like three four times a week. ![[wink.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/04707e6a7bbb03e0153e349d8a9270d30e1e9525.gif "wink"){kind=small}
I’ll try to bring one to Burgundy next time I fly to France from CA. I have maybe two cases of Californian wine, old and young, in my cellar in Beaune.
The last vintage I recall getting was 2012. I expect that we lost them after that. I don’t recall them carrying an NC importer sticker - i.e. they were being brought in by a more national importer.
Cheers,
fred
Thanks William, that would be amazing!
Nathan, our importer is based in Virginia so I’m appalled you can’t find our wines in NC… I know we have distribution issues in the US and I’ve tried to improve things lately (even if I don’t have much leverage) but the tariff and virus didn’t help.
So to give you a little more information about our “Charleston” cuvée.
First you have to know that I used to work for a Burgundy cooperage. I was in charge of sales and providing technical consultancy for our distributors and customers. It was a lot of fun, especially in Oregon, I really loved the place and the people there, would have probably settle there if I didn’t met my wife.
Second thing to know, my in-laws really don’t like wood in wines. I think they didn’t like it to begin with but 30years of wood-free winemaking didn’t help. As for myself, I’ve seen both end of the woody wine world, from beautifuly integrated woodiness elevating the wine to Pinocchio wines that leave you with splinters all around the mouth (Austrian winemakers were the best at it, telling me they didn’t like this style of wine but that it was “what the market demands”…). I must say eventhough I can appreciate well integrated wood, tasting new barrels year-long I kind of grew tired of overly oaked wines (but still love good Bourbon… I’ve stopped trying to understand myself) especially new wood.
So one of the first thing I wanted to bring to the estate was my oak experience but at the same time I knew it was a tricky subject.
I knew that Pierrette’s grandfather used to make wine before founding the coop and given what was available and affordable back then he had to use wood. Asking Pierrette and here mother I discovered that he used old demi-muid (600L barrels). That was a good start. Further inquiring, I found that the oldest vines we had was the one he planted coming back from WW1 close to a century ago (more now). There was something there.
Turned out, we still had around half an hectare of these vines on three blocks. So I went to check on them in more details as I’ve never really noticed (remember I went back to work on the estate in 2017 and this was 2016), and I tasted the wines from the different blocks.
Raverettes seemed to be the best candidate. It’s the closest block from the house, next to the orchard and the vegetable garden, with a subsoil of marl and topsoil of silts.
So in 2016, we extracted 600L from our press in the old vines part of the raverettes block (that mean some of the “Charleston” juice still goes into our classic “Quintaine” cuvée). And barrelled it down in a 2004 demi-muid I got from De Montille where I was working at the time
(To be continued…)
Thank you! These are great details to know! It looks like your wines are brought in through Kysela (who I imagine is your national importer) but the book appears to be split among a couple of different NC distributors. It is listed as Pierrette Et Marc Guillemont Michel, which is why I couldn’t find it when I searched the NC ABC database for Guillemot… (to find it, I searched under Kysela). Your wines are with a distributor that I don’t do business with but if we re-open, I’ll ask to see what they have in stock.
Great write-up Gautier. Fascinating insights, and very well written. I rarely go south past Chagny / Rully, but this makes me curious, very curious. I will make a note, maybe to visit over summer if the quarantine is over.
Thanks for pointing this out Nathan, I told Kysela so they can maybe try to get this fixed!
Thank you Jozef, you’ll be most welcome.
« Charleston » part2
So we had this 600L of century-old vines juice gently fermenting in this 12yo demi-muid. We had to find a spot for the demi-muid, but the only barrel cellar we had was the spirit one and it was not suited for wine, especially for fermenting juice (temperature, humidity, hygiene, access to water…). So we moved some pallets of bottled wine in the ageing cellar, just behind the fermentation cellar, close to the door, and set up a small pedestal for the demi-muid there. Fermentation went slowly but steadily, as often with our yeasts (always indigenous, but the fermentation dynamic being stable from one year to another, I’m pretty sure we have more or less the same every year) but due to the late harvesting date the cellar started to cool down quickly, which could have halted the fermentation.
You should know that, just as in Puligny-Montrachet, there is no fully underground cellar in Quintaine due to underground water in the village (on the plus side we have countless wells!). Being built on the hill, our cellar is only partially underground: you enter at ground level on one side (on this side we have the labeling room and the fermentation cellar) and you find yourself underground on the other side (ageing cellar). Hence we have slightly more temperature variations across seasons than deep underground cellar (like, say the chateau de Passe-Temps in Santenay with its crazy several storey cellar, firefighters train for caves interventions there…) but it’s not really an issue, as long as you don’t try fermenting in small vessels… Secondly I must mention we finished harvesting grapes on October 12th 2016 and got married on Octobre 15th… That tells you how late the harvest was, we hadn’t harvested in October in decades so we were pretty confident when we choose this date.
With the cellar cooling down we looked for all the old blankets we could find and covered the demi-muid. Now that we also have jars, it became a trademark technique and we raided all the local Salvation Army shops for old blankets, our cellar is super kitsch in winter time!
After a year spent in the demi-muid, we choose to keep the wine in a tank for a few month more. This has several benefit. First, we can keep our demi-muid full at all time, which contain the risk of microbial contamination, allowing us to use the same demi-muid for many years more: the wine stays in from harvest to harvest, we rack out the exact day we have our new juice ready, clean the barrel and refill immediately (some even put the new juice on the old lees, we don’t). Secondly a period of tank aging after wood aging lower the amount of dissolved oxygen at bottling and in terms of tasting helps better integrate the wood (I experienced this countless time when I was a barrel rep).
Bottling happened in February 2018, just in time to celebrate the 100 years of this vineyard planted in 1918. We struggled for the wine name. My wife and mother in law wanted a name referring to the vines ages. They proposed « the old ladies » which made me think about an old aunt you don’t want to kiss on Christmas, I thought about « les poilus » (=« hairy men » as were called WWI french fighters), they found it too warmongering. We looked for something more cheerful and festive that reminded us of the time where these vines first gave wine and « Charleston » came to mind. We loved it because it came from the US just like our vines rootstock but mostly because according to Wikipedia, Charleston can be « danced in many permutations: alone (solo), with a partner, or in groups » which sounded great for a nice bottle of wine!
Now that I came to know this wine better I have the intuition that we could also have called it « mu » which is the void concept in Buddhism. These vines have their how pace, undisturbed by the passing of seasons and time. They don’t seem to be changed by the rain or the sun, they know, and they make a wine that is out of this world.
Gautier
Before anyone else ask me question about something I’ll just take a few line to close (or complete at least) the terroir question.
As I previously mentionned, thanks to the consolidation work done by my in-laws, we are fortunate to work on 6.5 ha divided in 7 blocks. This gives us large enough plots to create natural barriers (hedges, paths, etc. .) to mitigate the border effects. As a matter of fact, we only have only 8 block sides with direct neighbors (out of a potential 7x4=28). Here are a few words about these blocks:
Champ-Rond 2.7ha
Our largest block, it descends gently along the hillside from the forest to the large hedge planted by Pierrette and Marc. A large vein of limestone outcrops diagonally (N-S) in the block. It is a kind of yellow Limestone, extremely hard and compact (sometimes I can’t break through despite the crowbar). Its rare cracks are surprisingly filled with small translucent crystals resembling quartz (probably calcite). The crowbar generally break the limestone along these pre-existing cracks. This block forms the heart of our wines, we consider it the “doctor” block: the wine is always good, more consistent between vintages than in other blocks.
On the bottom of the hill, a small, more clayey pocket is present. From this pocket, we draw our “Return to the Earth” cuvée (grapes growing in clay and aged in a clay jar, terracotta). This late-ripening part is always picked on the last day of harvest. It’s also in this part that we have been conducting our ungrafted vines planting trials since 2017.
Champ-Choley 0.8 ha
Close to Champ-Rond but a little higher on the hillside, towards Clessé (South), this block shares most of its characteristics with Champ-Rond. At its summit lay an abandoned quarry where we can observe its outcropping limestone subsoil. For years the Michel family had two trades: vines and stones. Quintaine stones were extracted until the end of the 19th century and renowned from Dijon to Lyon for the manufacture of fireplaces.
Le Chêne (=the oak)1.5ha
Further down the hill, a little below the village, this stony block produces very aromatic wines. But due to the thin soil, grapes ripen in the blink of an eye and we must therefore monitor them very closely in order to pick on the exact right day, avoiding cooked aromas and retaining freshness. Here the limestone is very hard, very close to the surface, but more fragmented, forming stones the size of a fist, polished by water infiltration. As a consequence, the vine roots find their way deep into the ground, between the stones.
view from the Chêne, with a clear sky you can see the Mont Blanc (highest mountain in Europe) from here on the left. (Almost everyday at sunrise)
Raverettes 1ha
This block is the closest to the estate, after the fruit garden and the orchard, on the hillside flatter part. Here, the limestone outcrops toward the east, s it gets closer to “Le Chêne”, however the mother rock is marly. We distinguish several smaller blocks in this plot: mimi, jean, cochet, millat …" 's vines" named after a former owner or the one who planted the block. Among these, the hundred-year-old vines planted by Sophie’s great grandfather, part of which is selected for our “Charleston” cuvée.
Saint-Trivier Chapel 0.5ha
We generally distinguish three sub-blocks here: Pesselières 0.2ha, Cordonières 0.1ha and Lie-Monin 0.2ha. Pesselières has the most active limestone of the estate. Its flush white limestones and exposure to prevailing winds give it an austere appearance. The earth itself is bleached by limestone dust which mixes with the topsoil silt. This block sit next to the local chapel, facing north.
Cordonières is one of our oldest vines from which we select our grafts to replace the missing feet. They are located under the Chapel, facing East.
The Lie-Monin with its soil rich in red clay (ferrous) is the plot from which our “Bulle” (sparkling) comes. Its subsoil is made up of a kind of limestone arena: limestone being eroded like coarse sand with pieces ranging from a few millimeters to a few centimeters. We take advantage of the fact that our “Bulle” doesn’t qualify for the appellation (ancestral method is not allowed in the “Crémant” AOC) to replant heirloom varieties here (Gouais blanc,Plant vert, different types of Gamay, Roublot, Tressot, etc.)
Gautier
Really nice timing on this write up here as the neighborhood shop that stocks your wines just reopened.
I grabbed a couple bottles and really enjoyed the one I opened last night (2016 Quintaine). This had a lot to offer, was quite forward and rich but also full of just enough tension. Great stuff and thanks for turning me on to your wines!
Thank you for this wonderful discussion. I am fascinated by this. Hoping to try the wines soon.
Hello and thank you guys,
Dan, glad you enjoyed our 2016 Quintaine! As I said above, this vintage is on the exotic side, if you try 15 or 17 for an exemple you’ll have. different experience (that I hope you’ll enjoy too!).
I’m sorry I didn’t post for a few days, we are full on growing season with a very early vintages on our hands which mean that we have to do everything at the same time. So I’ll just take the opportunity it’s Sunday morning and the wife is still asleep to post a few things about what we are doing now.
So we just finished the first round of hand weeding of the season: after harvest we mound (if that’s the right term: plow to bring some topsoil on the vines forming a small mound, less than 10cm) to protect, this protect the grafting point from winter cold, allow us to demount in the spring, effectively removing the weeds that grew during winter from the row (underneath the vines) and we consider that it also have some benefits in terms of energy flow. So in the spring, as soon as the soil is ready (dry enough but not too much, our soil really need us to be precise on the plowing days and plough type) we de-mound in two steps with the tractor. The third step is by hand and while we do that we cut all the roots that grew from the grafted vine during winter. If we were to let these grow, the grafted vines would then emancipate from its rootstock (letting it to die and rely on its own, newly formed root) and eventually die from phylloxera. Once this is done we bring back some top soil again to obtain a more or less flat surface. During the growing season we’ll come back again 1-3 time depending on the weather to weed again, by hand and/or tractor. Our most troublesome weed are thistle and bindweed that are f*ing hydras (take a piece, put it in soil, it’ll grow in no time).
So now this is done and it’s time to take care of the vine itself with green pruning, cutting the “courant” and spraying. Today I’d like to say a few words about spraying.
I could classify our spraying in three categories that are permeable:
-Organic (copper and sulfur)
-Biodynamic
-Phytotherapy
Copper and sulfur are the base of our anti-mildew spraying (our main pests are mildew, downy mildew in dry years and more recently black rot but this one is more sensitive to the copper sulfur combo than the 2 other so it’s generally not an issue for us). It needs to be sprayed from when the mildew eggs are ripe (generally around 5-7 leaves but depending on the season it could be a little earlier) until “veraison” (when the grappes soften and turn colours, at that point the grapes stomata are close, the mold can’t get in anymore so the grapes are safe) before it rains (the rain spreads the spores so they need to reach a part of a leave covered with copper or sulfur depending on the type). We need to renew the spray every time it’s washed away by the rain (up to 20mm depending on condition) or if the plant grew so much that the spray has been spread thin.
We try to use as low a dose as the season permit. Eventhough it’s more work we prefer very small dose with “frequent” spraying than large quantities at once. In order to lower our doses to the minimum, we purchased a new tractor and a new, more efficient sprayer last year. Same technology as the previous one (side by side spraying) but with the little extra power that allow to micronise further the spray thus reducing the quantities.
Last week, we had 3 days of rain that washed out the previous spray and we had a 1 day window for spraying before another large rain. I was a little bothered because we had a 30mm rain forecast for Monday and I knew that if I sprayed I’d be covered but then all my spray would be washed out and I’d have to spray twice in just a couple of days. So I decided not to use copper/sulfur but out phytotherapy spray.
Sophie harvesting flowers of Matricaria chamomilla
Phytotherapy is obviously not as efficient as copper/sulfur (but very helpful and complementary) so you need to be very precise with what you do and you need to constantly adjust. At Domaine Guillemot-Michel we cultivate or gather around 50 varieties of plants that we use dry or fresh in teas or fermented extract (also some essential oils but let’s discuss that later).
Some are used for their fertiliser-like properties (not quantitative, with plant we always work to provide stimulus) some for their pest-control properties. Last Sunday I used the following mix:
-thyme, oregano, savory (tomato, ham… no that’s my pizza recipe) this is straightforward anti fungal.
-horsetail: horsetail has a high silica content like many plants that grow in a wet environment (rice too for an exemple). It Harden the plant, FYI: the 501 biodynamic preparation (that we use too) is also silica but mineral, the vegetal quality of the horsetail silica makes it easier to absorb by the vines).
-fern: the above plants are used dried in teas, as a consequence they lack a “fresh” quality that we bring with the fern that is fermented while fresh, the vine is more receptive to the mixture thanks to it.
More later.
So, as I said, I sprayed phytotherapy on Sunday and, as forecasted, we got rain from Sunday night to Wednesday.
We had a little pause in the rain on Tuesday an we took the opportunity to spray a 501 preparation (a biodynamic preparation of silica). We generally try to spray it more or less three times in the spring in wet weather to harden the plant that tend to become a little flaccid when we have several days of rain. This is one more building block in our anti-mildew spraying program.
Our soils are really slippery when wet and after this kind of rain we need some time before we can enter the vineyard with a tractor (all the biodynamic preparation are sprayed by hand so it wasn’t an issue on Tuesday). However, we couldn’t wait too long as the previous spraying was long washed away and the downy mildew was lurking. Unfortunately the only two person capable of driving our new spraying tractor are:
1/my wife who gave birth a month ago but is obviously in no condition to drive a tractor for another few weeks
2/my father in law whom we just learned on Wednesday needed to get surgery by Friday…
Soooo… I was the only one left and even if I drove our old, smaller and more maneuverable spraying tractor a few time, I never did it on such slippery ground. ![[help.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/4030a9a60185376a7393a78002ce3ec0176e975e.gif "help"){kind=small}
On Thursday evening I went to our wettest block with my father in law and it seemed manageable so on Friday morning I hopped on the tractor and began on of the longest swear-laden drive of my life…
Little did I realized but the north wind had dried the part I thought would be wet … leaving the protected area slippery as ever.
Well well well long story short, when I was done, the tractor and its sprayer looked like a squished spider (when you don’t bang them repetitively on the vine posts, the spraying pots are supposed to hang vertically from the back of the tractor…), I had to finish the last few row by hand at 7pm and I spent the next few days repairing the sprayer and the broken wires in the vineyard. ![[oops.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1f129ddad071ffe5db6c99817c3cab666035a70a.gif "oops"){kind=small}
We’ll have another rainy day tomorrow, meaning 'll probably be spraying again on Monday or Tuesday…wish me luck.
For those who wonder: to date we are really happy with our spraying program results. The vines are perfectly healthy, the flowers should be in full bloom this weekend (hope the rain won’t be an issue) and we have yet to find traces of contamination. This means there is a good chance this weekend will be the first contamination of the year which is a late start and we can be hopeful for the vintage.
I thought you’d enjoy this little story that is a reminder that despite the luxury and glamorous glow some try to give wine, it’s still farming and those who make it will always have their hand in beautiful and tasty dirt. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
That sounds like quite an ordeal!
Thanks for the update! Hopefully the weather will get better and a bit less rainy!
Really enjoyed reading this thread on this lazy Sunday. Not sure how I stumbled across it, but if William and Otto enjoy these wines, sounds like they need to be tried! Where are they available in the States?