IPNC: Land or Hand?

Terroir predetermines the greatness of a wine. Or does it? Terroir is a romantic concept that appeals to wine lovers when the edges of the world get just a little blurry – right around that second glass of wine. We love the idea that a special parcel of soil produces wonderful wine, wine that could be made nowhere else, because the soil, the slope, the sun exposure and the microclimate would not be the same at any other place or time.

And in the next breath we extol our favorite winemakers. Be it Helen Turley, Heidi Peterson, Richard Sanford, Michel Rolland or a host of others, we slavishly applaud winemakers for their talent in crafting blockbuster vino.

So is it the land? Or is it the hand? What makes a superlative wine?

Right about now, you're probably saying, “Well, duh, both!” And of course you're right. This was driven home last week at a fascinating tasting conducted at the International Pinot Noir Celebration in McMinnville, Oregon, in the heart of the Willamette-rhymes-with-dammit Valley. The IPNC, a weekend bacchanal in its 23^rd year, focused this year on “Oregon dirt.” The main seminar tasting featured five Willamette Valley winemakers who have been conducting an intriguing exploration of “land or hand” since the 2006 harvest.

The winemakers are Lynn Penner-Ash of Penner-Ash Wine Cellars, Ken Wright of Ken Wright Cellars, Ted Casteel of Bethel Heights, Laurent Montalieu of Solena Cellars, and Steve Doerner of Cristom Vineyards. They each contributed grapes to the others from one of their vineyards, with each winemaker given free wine on making the resulting wine. The project is “five by five,” or 25 wines each vintage.

For logistics' sake, the IPNC tasting included wines from only two of the vineyards from the unusually hot 2006 vintage – so we had 10 wines to taste in two flights of five each. Ken Wright explained his theory that the geology – the land – would give essential characteristics to the wine grown there. The “parent material,” the underlying rock rather than the top soil of a vineyard, is the deciding factor, he explained.

In Oregon, that means either marine sedimentary soil deposited after the great Missoula glacier hissy fit hundreds of thousands of years ago (my notes are a bit indistinct at this point) or volcanic soils that thrust upward a few eons later when the Cascade Mountains (think Mount Saint Helens, Mount Hood, Mount Rainier, etc.) were formed. The two soil types form a patchwork throughout the Willamette Valley, sometimes even within the same vineyard, though at different points on a slope.

Two things stood out about the 10 wines presented at the IPNC. It became quite apparent as we tasted that the wines were arranged by winemaker – the first wine in each of the two flights was made by the same hand, and so on. So the hand of the winemaker seemed to be the dominant factor – Wright's were the darkest, most primordial, with a lot going on in the glass and not quite settled into a groove just yet. Penner-Ash's were also dark and almost brooding, while Doerner's were more tannic (a factor of whole-cluster pressing, it was explained), Bethel Heights were spicy and the Solena wines more delicate.

Yet there was also a continuity among the flights, showing the influence of the vineyards. The first flight, wines from a marine-sediment vineyard, featured black fruit flavors, such as blackberry, and some brown-sugar sweetness. They were also quite heavy, which was perhaps a factor of the unusual vintage. The second flight of wines, while still not shy, were brighter in their flavors – more on the red fruit side that reflected their origin in volcanic soils.

So yes, the answer to the “land or hand” question is both. But as a “terroirist,” I have to admit that the hand often makes the most noticeable difference – for better or worse, the winemaker's decision of when to pick, how long to soak the grapes on the skins or leave the wine in barrel, make the most easily apparent differences in a wine. Perhaps that's why we celebrate winemakers. And perhaps it's best to leave it up to them to decipher the nuances of the land.

Comments

[Allen Clark]

Nice write-up, Dave. Wish I could have been there this year to taste those particular wines. But I seem to recall reading elsewhere that, in order to more fully realize the goal of determining "land vs. hand" differences, the winemakers all had to agree on the same harvest date, so the only "hand" differences were in the winery. Is that true?

[Dave McIntyre]

Thats sort of the case - the winemaker responsible for each vineyard (who was contributing grapes to the other four) determined harvest dates; so yes, the idea was to give free rein to the hands in the winery - they were all painting with the same canvas, so to speak.