Plassence

I think it would be remiss of me not to point in the direction of fellow bloggers and pickers, Martin aka Sir Martin of Stockholm aka ‘the Swede’, who’s blog can be read here, and Ann, member of Team UK despite being, as she never failed to point out, a Black Forest girl. You know, like the cakes. You can read her gushings on Otago here. Martin’s blog has some rather amusing pics of the harvest, and since the camera lent by my bro died a couple of days before the end (sorry bro, I now have a new one and it is shiney. You will forgive me) this is your only chance, so take it or else.

                  I may one or twice talked about just what a good time we had working the harvest at Felton Road. This is despite the fact we were working long days and it was often fairly repetitive work. One recourse when the spirit was lagging was to recall and recite our favourite TV shows and films to each other. The big hitters were South Park, Team America, Monty Python, Flight of the Conchordes, The Breakfast Club, the works of Will Ferrell and Monty Python. I tired and failed with The Fast Show and The Mighty Boosh, and my attempts to get everyone to clap at once while I pretended I was a giant breaking a twig fell on stoney ground. Not sure Bill Bailey’s genius has yet been recognised beyond the shores of my small island, more’s the pity. Martin was the most adept at this, and could spend about 9 hours straight quoting South Park and Team America. His chief joy was Monty Python, and one line from one sketch had us going for about a week, the German counter-joke from the World’s Funniest Joke. All it needed was one of us to start saying ‘there were two peanuts walking down de strasser’ in a thin, halting German accent and we would be crying with laughter. I don’t know: it could have been the glucose from two many Pinot Noir grapes, or maybe low blood sugar between smokos, or maybe just a weird form of mass hysteria, but that shit was funny.

                   And of course, as you may have deduced from this blog, another source of considerable merriment was ze Germans. One of them even complained, ‘don’t you ever get bored of telling German jokes?’ to which we replied, ‘you may get bored hearing them, but we never get bored telling them’. But then everyone’s nationality came in for a bit of ribbing: the Swede was all about saunas, and making ‘tasteful’ films, and smorgasboards. The French were always giving up, the Swiss wouldn’t take a side and I somehow earned the moniker ‘Sir James’. That was mainly down to the Swede’s perchant for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and brave Sir Robin: ‘when danger reared its ugly head he bravely turned his tail and fled’. We would challenge each other to duels, ‘buckets or schnips!’ would come the cry, since they were the only weapons to hand.

                 The point of me telling you this? Rather mysteriously it is terroir, which means it is doubly mysterious as no-one apart from the French, who’s word it is, is quite sure what it means. There have been some clumsy attempts to translate it into English, like ‘somewhereness’. I tried, and my best word is ‘essence’ (I thought about ‘being’ and ‘truth’ before getting to this). Then I thought that doesn’t make it specific to wine, so inspired by ‘The Adventure of English’ book I have been reading (by Melvyn Bragg, but don’t hold that against it. A jolly good read) I decided to make one up, much like Billy Shakespeare did. Obviously I’m not quite as qualified as he (not yet anyway), but I thought I’d have a stab. So here it is: plassence, a combination of ‘place’ and ‘essence’. I’m rather pleased with it, because the terroir is the expression of a place by it’s wine. It becomes very specific, so the same grapes will produce different flavours in adjoining vineyards, and even on blocks within the vineyards, because the microclimate is subtly different. As the poem I wrote on the wall of my last shop goes, which no doubt draws many admiring glances to this day, ‘a great wine will carry echoes of the land that born and bore it, pine from the forests that border it, herb from the plants grow amongst it, flint from the stones it winds its roots around’. You can be scientific about terroir, sorry plassence, examining topographical maps, soil maps, degree days, hours of sunlight, millimetres of rain and adjacent water, either river or lake, to determine a site’s suitability. You can go on: morning mists, unseasonal frosts, prevailing winds, the heat of summer and the cool of autumn. All play a part in the grapes development during the growing season and so the resultant wine. This concept is at the heart of the French philosophy of wine, and so the approach is more laissez-faire, allowing the grape and environment to interact and give a true expression of plassence in aroma and taste of the wine. The Aussies turn round and call it lazy wine-making (they would), but the truth is when you have to interfere in the winery too much the wine will lose a lot of its idiosyncracy. The quality of fruit should be the over-whelming goal of a winery, because the simple rule of thumb is good fruit will make good wine. If you have to compensate for poor fruit, modern winery methods will enable you to make a drinkable wine but never a truely great one.

                 Now in my time selling wine I have talked a lot about terroir/plassence, but I was yet to truely experience it, and there in Otago I did more than that, I lived it. I went to work in thermals when the temperature was -3, with those great propellers whirring away to drive the cold air away from the grapes. By the time I was finished I was down to t-shirt and shorts and ready for an hour of sun-baking on my porch. I saw how early the sun would creep over the Eartern range and hit the grapes, and how late it would leave them as it retreated to the West. I walked in soil that was sand when dry, yet like sticky clay when wet, and that sparkled with the abundance of quartz and minerals (there was gold in dem dar hills). I felt these great weather systems sweep in from the Southern oceans to batter the West Coast and attempt to reach the vineyards at Bannockburn, only to be thwarted by the mountains sucking away at their ire. To put that into perspective, we got 484ml of rain in one day at Milford Sound. That is more than Felton Road gets in a year, averaging around 425ml. Fjordland and the West Coast measure their yearly rain in metres, over 7 at Milford. I also felt the heat of the sun, with its high UV rating, as we dashed for the factor 30 at smokos. When I was picking with Didier, from Beaune in Burgundy, he expressed surprise at the paucity of the canopy of the vines, yet the richness of the grapes they produced. In Burgundy there would be much more foliage, he assured me. We fed that back to the likes of Sarah and Nik, the second best viticuluralist in Central Otago, and theorised it was the strength of the southern sun. These are all terroir, these are all what makes vineyards sites special and unique, and lends those qualities to the wine.

                  Of course there is still nurture: frosts must be fought, birds must be scared, vines must be trained and fruit must be thinned. The viticultural team at Felton Road focuses primarily on the quality of the soil. While grapes favour more liminal sites, with free-draining soils that would struggle with to produce other crops, they still need life there. And that is how they deliver great fruit, and I tasted it all. I tasted chardonnay, pinot noir, riesling as well as the rogue clones that pop up in the vineyard like gewurztraminer, pinot gris and cabernet franc. There was even one strange vine in Block 2 that tasted like socks. That didn’t go in the bin. Ironically I was thinking as I trudged to Block 4 to pick riesling, I hadn’t yet tasted New Zealand’s most famous and widely planted grape, sauvignon blanc. And lo and behold, in that block we found about 3 erroneous sav blanc vines. It was delicious, like chewing a sweet leaf, so intense was the vegetal notes. It actually ended up my favourite grape. A recent ride in Marlborough served up a further meal of them from grapes left behind by a harvester. That machine owes someone a beer.

                   But there’s more to plassence than even all of that: I firmly believe there is a human factor. Unlike other workers on other vineyards the majority of us had a real commitment to wine in gerneral, and in Felton Road in particular. While it is the wine that firsts draws the attention to Felton Road, and certainly bought me, Ann and Martin all the way from Europe to pick, it is the people that make you want to come back. I know I’d follow Gareth in battle if he asked. I remember a great evening spent at his with his wife Karen and Alastair aka ‘Mister Mac’ when he made us try to guess the grape and origins of a wine he had disguised with a sock. Picking alongside Stuart Elms and his sister Audrey was a pure joy. Getting fed by Karen, Owen Calvert and Nigel throughout the harvest was generous and superb. The meal at the end was a standout, not least because they raided Felton’s library and gave us a 1998 sauvignon (vines that have since been grubbed up), a 2002 Riesling, a 2000 Block 5 and 2001 Block 3, as well as an older Block 6 chardonnay. You can add to that the copious amounts of vin gris, riesling and pinot noir they served us at more than one lunch (bottles labels ‘TBD’ Nigel told us, literally To Be Drunk, the results of various trials that would never be commercially sold). We became a big family and the warmth and happiness I’m sure pourback into the grapes and so the wine, just as it was poured into me. I spent my days grinning from ear to ear, laughing and joking almost constantly, and it was the land and the grapes and the wine and the people that did that to me. That my friends, is terroir.

                 And it is terroir, not plassence. Because althought it is a good word, English doesn’t need an equivalent, because they other thing that book taught me is the wonderful ability of this language to absorb ones from others, as well as ones we make up. Its just a bit of a bugger to pronounce.