A meeting of fine wine minds

4 December 2023 by in Book publishing, Classic Wine Library

PRESS RELEASE: Académie du Vin Library Ltd. today announced the acquisition of the Classic Wine Library publishing list from Infinite Ideas Ltd.

This wine publishing brand of 33 titles is synonymous with quality reference guides to many of the world’s top wine regions, as well as specialist titles on history, marketing and biodynamic practices. Its list of authors includes many MWs and leading wine writers. There are more titles scheduled for publication in 2024 and 2025, including The Wines of California, Wines of the Loire Valley and The Wines of Beaujolais.

Hermione Ireland, managing director of Académie du Vin Library, said: “We are thrilled and honoured to be the new custodians for this series of books, an essential part of the wine publishing industry and its knowledge base. It will add a crucial reference aspect to our existing list that focuses more on personal stories. We have huge respect for everything that Richard Burton, with Rebecca Clare and the editorial board, have done with the brand; they have a world-beating list of authors and they continue to commission writers of the highest quality. We know our own audience will be keen to learn more about Classic Wine Library titles.

“This acquisition makes Académie du Vin Library the largest specialist wine publisher in the world and we look forward to working with retail partners, both in books and in wine, to share our great list with people who are wine-curious.”

Steve White, chairman of Infinite Ideas, said: “The Classic Wine Library will grow and prosper as part of Académie du Vin Library. We are pleased with its future prospects and believe the excellent slate of authors who have made it the most important professional list of wine books will benefit from the greater resources now available.”

A new web site for The Classic Wine Library will be launched in early 2024.


ABOUT ACADEMIE DU VIN LIBRARY
Académie du Vin Library is an imprint founded by Steven Spurrier and friends, dedicated to publishing the finest wine writing of the past, the present and the future. Our list is small and will never be large – because we value quality over quantity. We choose our books with care – above all for their readability, but also because we genuinely believe they have something important to say about the world of fine wine that will enhance your drinking pleasure.

ABOUT INFINITE IDEAS
Founded in 2003 by Richard Burton and David Grant, Infinite Ideas has built a reputation for books on wine for professionals, students and the really serious oenophile. It also publishes inspirational books on business, personal development and the arts.

For more information please contact:
Hermione Ireland at hermione.ireland@academieduvinlibrary.com or on (+44)7500 708804

Extract: Biodynamic Wine by Monty Waldin

26 January 2022 by in Classic Wine Library, Extracts, Wine and spirits

The origins of biodynamics
Biodynamics dates from 1924 and is the oldest alternative agriculture movement. Biodynamics pre-dated the global organic agriculture movement whose founding organization, the UK’s Soil Association, dates from 1946. In fact the very word ‘organic’ was derived from the biodynamic ideal that each farm or smallholding should always work towards becoming a self-sustaining organism in its own right.

The particular feature of biodynamics – and where biodynamics differs from organics and indeed all other forms of alternative agriculture – is the use of nine so-called ‘biodynamic preparations’. These are made from cow manure, the mineral quartz (also called silica), and seven medicinal plants: yarrow, chamomile, stinging nettle, oak bark, dandelion, valerian and Equisetum arvense or common horsetail. These nine preparations are applied to the land or crops either by being first incorporated into a compost pile or by being diluted in water as liquid sprays.

Biodynamic preparations are used in homeopathic quantities, meaning they can produce an effect in extremely diluted amounts, but they are not homeopathic treatments per se. Their purpose is to make the farm and farmer, its crops, animals and wild habitat, self-sufficient, self-sustaining and socially, economically and spiritually robust. These concepts may seem woolly in our world of smartphones and space exploration, but would have seemed less so to 1920s Europeans coping with the ravages of both the First World War and then its even deadlier successor, an influenza pandemic.

The methods used to make some of the preparations may seem strange initially but are neither high tech, expensive, costly to the environment nor potentially harmful. Anyone, from children to grandparents, can (and do) make these preparations. The biodynamic preparations are not patented so they can never realistically be made purely for profit, and they seem to get good results for farms and vineyards.

Sceptics, however, claim the biodynamic preparations produce no measurable changes to either farm health or crop quality; thus there is no ‘biodynamic effect’. Such sceptics argue that biodynamic winegrowers owe the high quality of their wine either to having a top-quality vineyard terroir in the first place, or that vineyards which improved after ‘going biodynamic’ did so because the winegrower learnt to become extra attentive in the vineyard by following a biodynamic ‘prevention rather than cure’ mindset (e.g. better pruning, recalibrating spray machinery so sprays are more effective), and not because the vines were treated with biodynamic sprays or composts. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of winegrowers are using these preparations which are essential to biodynamic agriculture. Their regular use is the fundamental requirement of Demeter, the non-profit organization which has overseen and certified biodynamic agriculture worldwide since 1928.

The biodynamic preparations were created by an Austrian called Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) shortly before he died. His motivation was to remedy what he sensed was the arrested spiritual development of his contemporaries. Steiner believed the forces people needed to kickstart their spiritual development would come from digesting food imbued with these desirable and necessary forces, and that getting these forces into food required a new way of growing food: biodynamic agriculture. For this Steiner developed nine biodynamic preparations to moderate and regulate biological processes in nature. This is the ‘bio’ part of biodynamics. The ‘dynamic’ part comes by understanding the preparations’ role in enhancing and strengthening forces that form or shape material substance, both on the farm and within both the farmer and the crops. These forces are referred to in biodynamics as ‘etheric formative forces’. Like gravity, they are unseen but have a tangible effect on both soil and on crop plants as well as on the animals or humans who digest those plants. Steiner’s nine biodynamic preparations can therefore be thought of as spiritual remedies for the human being which are administered indirectly through the healing process of the Earth. Biodynamic farmers accept that there is no substance or matter without spirit, and equally no spirit without matter. So the point of growing biodynamic food and drink is not only to provide the substances (vitamins, carbohydrates, protein, fats, minerals) to nourish the human body but also to provide the forces needed to form and nourish the human spirit.

The spiritual side of biodynamics is the one most open to misinterpretation, misrepresentation and ridicule. One common misconception is that apart from encouraging you to start wearing sandals and paying less attention to personal hygiene, growing or eating biodynamic food will also turn you into a religious fruitcake. I discovered biodynamics in 1993 but had struggled to find many redeeming features in organized religion from the age of seven (1974) onwards. I am not a fan of sects. I do consider myself spiritual in the pantheistic sense of feeling my spirit lift palpably when I feel a connection with the natural world. This can happen when standing euphorically on the top of a mountain or, more mundanely, when looking at pigeons fluttering around under the eaves of the railway station my train is about to depart from.

In my experience winegrowers – be they biodynamic or conventional – who come across as fundamentalist proselytizers tend not to make the best wines, often because they are inflexible and unwilling to compromise. This may be fine when churning out widgets on a production line but is not adapted to a product like wine, dependent on the vagaries of nature. Fortunately, the fundamentalist proselytizers tend to be in the minority.

Most winegrowers newly adopting biodynamics start by seeing it as I did initially: as a sensible, doable, interesting, inexpensive tool to produce tastier grapes to nourish the human palate – and if they also provide the formative forces to nourish the human spirit, so be it. Biodynamic ultras argue that this purely ‘substance rather than forces’ way of looking at biodynamics means missing the real reason we should be biodynamic. I would argue that materialistic and only vaguely spiritual people like me – meaning exactly the kind of people Steiner developed his biodynamic preparations for – first have to understand and accept how the biodynamic tool works, and only then can we perhaps appreciate that our spiritual development may have lacked something to begin with after all.


Extract from Biodynamic Wine © Monty Waldin (Infinite Ideas, 2016)
To read more, buy your copy direct from the Classic Wine Library shop.

Master Chefs of IT serve up tantalising smorgasbord of ideas

26 January 2022 by in Business and finance

Since its inception, the IT department has largely been relegated to a reactive, functional role servicing the needs of the organisation. But recently IT has made its way up from the basement and its executives – CIOs, CTOs, CDOs – now have strategic roles, with digital technology instrumental in business development, customer relationships and product innovation. This change has been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses realise the potential IT-led solutions have to transform the workplace, creating virtual offices, enhancing customer–supplier relationships and streamlining processes.

Now CIONET, the world’s leading organisation for corporate digital leaders, has brought the latest thinking on information technology together in a new book authored by IT expert Roger Camrass, CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for digital success. This is a business book with a difference: instead of the customary text book illustrated with graphs and charts, readers are presented with a highly illustrated coffee-table book. CIONET Cookbook takes the analogy of a Michelin-starred restaurant and applies it to business: where a prestigious restaurant has a dynamic and creative Master Chef, the successful business of today must be led by a CIO with vision and energy. According to the book’s introduction: “Traditional enterprises face a new challenge: not just surviving, but thriving in the digital age. As the executives responsible for leading business technology, CIOs will need to meet this challenge head-on.”

The book presents its ideas in three main sections, analysing what a top-ranking digitally led business looks like, what tools make up the best IT kitchens and what is expected of IT Master Chefs and their teams. These ideas are expanded through recipes for success from 25 of today’s most influential IT leaders, and as with all the best cookbooks the recipes are illustrated with tantalising colour photography.

Featured CIOs have been instrumental in the success of global businesses from industries as diverse as food, communications, logistics and pharmaceuticals. While the businesses operate in vastly different areas, all the interviewed digital leaders are keen to point out how significantly the role of IT has changed. Tarun Kohli of reinsurance company Swiss Re sums it up neatly when he says: “We don’t need a digital strategy for business, we need a business strategy for a digital future.” This is not a technology manual but rather a guide to implementing change in business. Common themes throughout the book involve the ideas of openness and the importance of listening, with CIOs agreeing that it is crucial to get buy-in from customers, stakeholders and employees if any strategy is to succeed. As Cindy Hoots, CDO/CIO of AstraZeneca says, “When you focus on the people, you will get the results.”

This beautifully presented book will not only inspire today’s IT executives and those of the future but also make a handsome addition to their office desks.

About CIONET
With the largest membership of corporate digital leaders across Europe, Latin America, the US and Australia, CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become both more at ease and more successful in their jobs so they do not merely keep up with change but ultimately define it.

About lead author Roger Camrass
A pioneer of today’s internet at MIT in the early seventies, Roger has spent over fifty years helping global corporations harness the power of digital techno­logies. He is now director of research for CIONET International.


CIONET Cookbook is published by Infinite Ideas on 28 January 2022.
ISBN: 9781913022303, hb, full colour, 210 x 210 mm, 160pp, rrp £40.
Also available as an eBook.
Review copies available from marketing@infideas.com; 07802 443957
Buy CIONET Cookbook

Extract: The wines of South Africa by Jim Clarke

21 January 2022 by in Classic Wine Library, Extracts, Wine and spirits

Wine styles in the Western Cape
Sparkling wines
South Africa is the first New World country to develop a designation for its traditional method sparkling wines that does not ride the coattails of Champagne. Today, Methode Cap Classique, or, more informally, MCC, is the fastest growing wine category in the country, doubling every five years. Not only is quality very high, especially in relation to price; bubbly is also more profitable for the country’s struggling wine growers. They can typically pick grapes for these wines earlier, pulling the maximum output from the vineyard when waiting longer might cost up to 10 percent in crop volume due to dehydration.

The history of sparkling wine production in South Africa is not a long one. The first example came from Frans Malan at Simonsig in 1971 (there are occasional mentions of “Champagne” earlier, and there were definitely sparkling wines of some sort, but there’s no evidence these were methode champenoise wines). In 1935 the so-called Crayfish Agreement with the French had forbidden the use of French wine terms on labels. Consequently, Simonsig called the wine “Kaapse Vonkel” – “Cape bubbles” in Afrikaans, expecting that this would become the accepted name for the category.

Simonsig and other estate producers were largely unconcerned with the export market at the time, so an Afrikaans name seemed reasonably marketable. Simonsig became more serious about bubbly production in 1978; Villiera and Boschendal followed, using the term methode champenoise, which they considered a description of the technique and not a geographical reference. By the time the French protested, more than a dozen producers were using the term. Export markets were just beginning to open when, in 1992, the Cap Classique Producers Association formed. South Africa’s bubblies gained a more marketable, romantic, and French name that also avoided the use of any protected French wine words.

There are over 200 producers making Methode Cap Classique wines, although many do so only in small amounts for wine club members, tasting room sales, and so forth. Pieter Ferreira of Graham Beck estimates total production to be approximately 7.7 million bottles. As of 2021 using the designation requires 12 months of lees aging; association members are already adhering to that minimum, but changing the actual regulations has dragged on, so for now the legal requirement on the books is only nine months. Beyond that, prerequisites are fairly bare-bones: wines must contain at least three bars of pressure, and must go to market in the same bottle that the second fermentation occurred in. The association recommends the traditional Champagne varieties Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier, but other varieties are permitted. Several producers are making Chenin Blanc-based examples, and Pinotage makes an appearance in some examples such as Simonsig’s Brut Rosé.

Growth has presented challenges for the Cap Classique category. With many producers making bubbly but not specializing in it, some are concerned about consistency within the category. The Cap Classique Producers Association is working hard to encourage best practices in-cluding extended lees aging, hand-harvesting, and whole bunch pressing. There is also move-ment toward some sort of reserve designation. As imagined at the time of writing, this would prescribe a minimum 36 months on the lees and limit wines to the three traditional Cham-pagne varieties and possibly Chenin Blanc and Pinotage.

The success and quality of Cap Classique wines often surprises people who associate the style with Champagne’s cooler growing conditions. Ferreira says growing grapes for sparkling wine in warmer areas calls for carefully shading the grapes through row direction and canopy management. Robertson has become a key source for Cap Classique wine grapes, Chardonnay especially, thanks to its limestone soils and a good diurnal temperature shift. Franschhoek is also a leading source. Most of the more successful producers pull from those two districts and perhaps elsewhere. Charles Fox, which uses estate fruit from their farm in Elgin, would be a rare exception.

Vintage Methode Cape Classique is not necessarily a higher-tier product than non-vintage. Given that vintages are not as variable in South Africa as they are in Champagne, many pro-ducers don’t feel the need to blend vintages and choose to produce vintage-labeled wines as their mainstay. Some, however, such as Colmant, consider multi-vintage blending to be fun-damental to creating complex, consistent, high-quality bubblies; the reserve wine is not a tool to compensate for variation, but a flavor and textural component. Blancs de blancs of 100 percent Chardonnay are fairly common; blancs de noirs less so. In fact, the designation blanc de noirs under SAWIS regulations indicates a white wine of any sort made from red grapes, not just sparkling wines. On a related note, Boschendal introduced a still white/pale rosé Chardonnay–Pinot Noir blend, essentially a non-sparkling Cap Classique blend, in the early 1980s, and several other producers have also adopted the style.

Methode Cap Classique sweetness designations conform to E.U. standards; most are bruts. Outside of the Cap Classique category there are a large number of Charmat or force-carbonated wines, generally in more budget price ranges.

Sweet and fortified wines
South Africa’s most famous sweet wine, Constantia, has been resurrected by the producers in the ward of the same name. Klein Constantia introduced their recreation, the Vin de Con-stance, starting from the 1986 vintage. Groot Constantia followed with the Grand Constance from 2003. Despite its prominence, there is no regulated definition for the ward’s dessert wines. Both Klein and Groot Constantia use late harvest grapes, free from botrytis, but Groot Constantia uses red Muscat de Frontignan in its blend rather than just white, creating a clear contrast in color and aroma. Neither is fortified.

Today South Africa designates unfortified dessert wines (known as “natural sweet”) into a few categories. Aside from the late harvest wines exemplified by Constantia’s wines, botrytized, noble late harvest wines play an interesting historical role as well. Regulations dating from 1957 prohibited naturally sweet wines with more than 30 grams per liter of sugar, but Günter Brözel, the cellarmaster at Nederburg, was dead-set on making a botrytized wine akin to those he knew from his birthplace, Germany. Given the generally warm, dry conditions, botrytis is not a common occurrence in the Cape. Brözel proceeded anyhow, producing South Africa’s first botrytis wine in 1969. Named Edelkeur, it brought home more than a dozen gold medals in international competitions but could not be sold locally. The next vintage of the wine was 1972. Nederburg took sales into its own hands by founding the Nederburg Auction in 1975, sidestepping regulations and the regular retail market by using the auction to sell and highlight the wine. Much to Brözel’s dismay, the Edelkeur Noble Late Harvest sold for the same price as Lieberstein, the massive SFW off-dry Chenin blend, but soon the wine’s reputation took off. The wine has consistently been one of the most expensive items in the auction ever since. The auction itself, renamed in 2019 as the Cape Fine & Rare Wine Auction, remains a stage for featuring some of the Cape’s most exclusive, high-end wines from Nederburg and the other producers invited to take part.
Today, a number of producers also make Noble Late Harvest wines, from several different grape varieties. Paul Cluver, in Elgin, makes a Riesling; Ken Forrester’s “T”, named for his wife Teresa, is a Chenin Blanc. South Africa’s final expression of natural sweet wines would be those made from grapes dried either on straw beds after picking, or desiccated on the vine by crimping the stems and leaving the bunches to hang. De Trafford’s Chenin Blanc Vin de Paille is a notable example.

Historically, fortified wines played a much bigger role in the industry than they do today, and made up the bulk of production until 1953, when natural (i.e. unfortified) wines caught up with them. The latter had begun to grow as early as the 1880s, aided by a burgeoning temper-ance movement that favored them. The Western Cape was the main consumer of the “newer” style of wine, suggesting that fortification was important at least in helping the wines travel well. Today, annual production of fortified wine hovers at just above one million liters per year, compared to over 500 million liters of still wine. Nonetheless, the history shines through in the quality established by long tradition.

Many of these fortified wines were long known by Iberian names – Port, Sherry, etc. – but in 2000 South Africa signed agreements with the E.U. to respect such terms; both “Port” and “Sherry” disappeared from South African exports in 2002, and from the domestic market a decade later. Today, the word “Cape” has, in essence, taken the place of “Port” on labels: a Cape Vintage is a vintage fortified wine, Cape Tawny has the maderized nutty taste one would expect, and so forth. Sherry-style wines bear the stylistic indicator – Amontillado, for example – without the geographically-specific word “Sherry”.

Fortified wines made from the various sorts of Muscat live their own lives, free from Europe-an naming controversies. They are labeled “Muscadel” if they are made from white or red Muscat de Frontignan, or “Hanepoot” if from Muscat d’Alexandrie. Jerepigo (or jerepiko) is unfermented but fortified grape juice, most commonly made from Muscat; it is typically very sweet and decidedly grapey.

Today Calitzdorp, in the Klein Karoo, is home to several producers who continue to offer Port-style wines that can compete with Iberia’s best; Boplaas, Bayly, and Axe Hill are all top examples. The Swartland is home to a few like-minded producers as well. The Muscat-based fortified wines are a specialty of many of the higher-yielding areas, including the Northern Cape. For many co-ops and large operations such as Badsberg or Orange River Cellars their perennial prize winner is a Hanepoot, Jerepigo, or Muscadel.

Sommeliers studying for their exams seem to obsess over the term “Boberg”, a W.O. once used to designate a fortified wine from Paarl, Franschhoek, Wellington, or Tulbagh. There have been preciously few of these since the 1970s, and the term was officially repealed in February 2019.


Extract from The wines of South Africa © Jim Clarke (Infinite Ideas, 2020)
To read more, buy your copy direct from the Classic Wine Library shop.

Extract: The wines of Southwest U.S.A. by Jessica Dupuy

20 January 2022 by in Classic Wine Library, Extracts, Wine and spirits

The advent of winemaking in the Southwest
While most American history is first associated with British colonization along the east coast of the country at the beginning of the seventeenth century, New Mexico was first colonized by the Spanish. Second to Florida, New Mexico is one of the oldest state names in the country. It was proclaimed Nuevo Méjico in 1565 by Spanish explorer Francisco de Ibarra in his expeditions north of Mexico.

New Mexico also has the distinction of having the longest history of wine production in the United States. As early as 1629, vineyard plantings were recorded among the Franciscan friars who established missionary settlements northward along the Rio Grande. The missions were the result of Spanish exploration by Don Juan de Oñate, the son of a wealthy silver baron in Zacatecas, Mexico in the late sixteenth century, who charted a new route up through the Chihuahuan Desert which later became known as the El Camino Real, or Royal Road, and would become the major trading route from Mexico to the New World. His initial quest was in search of gold for the Spanish monarchy, but he was also charged with establishing a settlement for the Christian colonization of the native Puebloan tribes of the region. Along with him, he brought colonists, Franciscan monks, soldiers, and cattle to establish a foothold in the area. In 1598, he established the settlement of San Juan de los Cabelleros, taking over the existing Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, which was located 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of present-day Santa Fe. Although the area did provide excellent land for livestock grazing and relatively fertile soils for crop farming, because of the lack of gold or any other precious metals the endeavor ended up costing the Spanish crown more than it cared to continue investing. In 1608, with the settlement in danger of abandonment, Friar Lázaro Ximénez traveled to Mexico as an ambassador for Oñate to plead for the continuation of the establishment.

The missions achieved some success in their quest to convert native inhabitants of the region—primarily Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo—but had a major obstacle in the presentation of sacramental wine. Vineyard establishment in the New World had begun as early as 1521, in Mexico’s Valle de Parras, when noted Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés required that on the land they were granted, each Spanish settler plant 1,000 vines for every 100 natives in service to them. The effort was geared to producing sufficient wine for everyday life within the settlement. More than seven decades later, Spain’s King Philip II noticed a steep cut in the exportation of Spanish wine to the New World. At the time, grape production accounted for nearly a quarter of Spain’s foreign revenue. In an attempt to control revenues from the sale of wine and protect the Spanish agricultural industry at all costs, Spain passed a law in 1595 that prohibited grapevine growing in the New World. Instead, the missions were required to await shipments of wine from Spain via Mexico. This could entail a wait of as much as three years, assuming shipments weren’t fated to sink to the bottom of the ocean, due to frequent shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. What little wine did make it to the outpost at New Mexico was often maderized and spoiled from the long, oppressively hot transport through the Chihuahuan Desert.

As a result, and in defiance of the Spanish order, Jesuit priests of Parras, Mexico began planting grapevines at the turn of the sixteenth century and making wine for sacramental use. The idea—and most likely a handful of vine cuttings—made its way to the Piro Pueblo of Senecú, near what is now the city of Socorro, where Franciscan monk Fray Garcia de Zúniga and Capuchín monk Antonio de Arteaga also planted grapes at the mission church, and through the churches of the Rio Grande in 1629. But these vineyards were not long-lived. Throughout the seventeenth century, a combination of harsh winters, massive flooding along the Rio Grande, and frequent skirmishes between the Spanish settlers and the warring native Apache tribe all but destroyed most of the vineyards as well as the entirety of the Senecú Pueblo.

The grape mission
It is unclear exactly which grape variety was planted by the Franciscan monks in 1629, since there are no remains of the original vineyard plantings. However, many believe that it was the Mission grape. According to research from the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologica in Madrid, it was the earliest Vitis vinifera grown in the western hemisphere. It is also believed to be the first grape variety planted in the Valle de Parres, Mexico, which is likely where cuttings for the early New Mexico planting originated. Of course, it wasn’t known in Spain as the Mission grape. In its native country, it was Listan Negro, or Listan Prieto, a native Spanish grape that was known for its thick skin and sturdy, hardy trunks. It proved resilient in transfer to the New World as well as productive in the dry, mineral-rich soils of New Mexico. The variety has been genetically linked to Listan Blanco, or Palomino Blanco, the primary grape in Sherry production.

Mission grapes form large, loose clusters that allow air to move through the grapes, greatly reducing the risk of rot and mold. The result is a cluster that can take more time to ripen on the vine. Depending on growing conditions, the vines can easily produce more than 10 tons per acre (22.42 metric tons per hectare) if yields are not managed. They were probably allowed to push for the higher quantities for the Spanish mission sacramental wines in the New World.

In terms of wine production, there’s a reason Mission isn’t topping the list of the wine world’s most planted grapes. Though it has rather thick skins, the fruit rarely develops much concentration either in color or phenolic content. Wines tend to lack structure, depth, and acidity. Though it served its purpose for sacramental wine, it generally falls short in expectation compared to the international varieties that are planted throughout the western hemisphere today.

Today, Listan Negro is rarely seen in Spain, aside from some plantings on the Canary Islands. But it seems to have found a home in the Americas. In South America, in particular, it is grown for bulk wine production and in recent years for serious table wines. Argentina grows it under the name of Criolla, Peru calls it Negra Criolla, in Bolivia it is Missionara, and in Chile, it’s País. While not widely planted in the United States, you can find it in California’s Santa Barbara regions as well as further north near Sacramento.

You can also find it at Tularosa Vineyards Winery in the small town of Tularosa in Southern New Mexico, just east of the Rio Grande. With elevations ranging between 4,500 and 6,800 feet (1,372 and 2,072 meters), the Tularosa Basin, where the town is situated, first saw vineyards in the 1860s from Mission vine cuttings brought by Spanish settlers.

An article in the Alamogordo News in September 1932, describes the town of Tularosa in 1870:

Grapes were planted, and wine was made to supply the local requirements. The principal product was a native sour wine locally known as “cerque” and was freely used by many residents. The usual method of manufacture was very primitive and crude, and in present times would be condemned as unsanitary and unfit for human consumption. The grapes were emptied into rawhide containers; sack like affairs (tinas) suspended on forked posts, which in turn carried square frames of poles to which the rims of the tramping sacks were lashed. Men in their bare feet tramped them to a pulpy mass, sinking to their knees in the process. The “pummies” were then skimmed from the surface as they rose to the top of the fermenting wine. After 10 days without disturbing, the sediment collected in the bottom, and cool fermentation was allowed to complete. The wines were deemed ready 30 days from the second draining. Some wines produced were a well-flavored stimulating beverage, while others made a vinegar-like product that intoxicated and sickened with a nauseating flavor. The most palatable was, of course, in greater demand and brought a better price, but the inferior stuff was still consumed at a profit to the producers.

A century later, Tularosa Vineyards Winery was founded in the late 1980s by New Yorker David Wickham and his wife, Teresita. Following a tour of duty in the U.S. Air Force, the Wickhams settled in the quaint New Mexico small town in the late 1970s and stumbled into the hobby of grape growing and winemaking. This endeavor would later lead to the planting of 10 acres (4 hectares) of vineyard in 1985 and the opening of their winery in 1989. In 1989, Wickham planted a small vineyard of Mission grapes from the cuttings of a vine he found in the backyard of a man named Ben Chavez in La Luz, New Mexico. The vine was estimated to be a little more than 100 years old. With a trunk diameter of approximately 30 inches (76 centimeters), the single vine is said to have yielded more than 300 pounds (136 kilograms) of grapes in different years. To preserve the historical relevance of the grape within New Mexico, Wickham has cultivated an acre of Mission vines from which he produces in an off-dry style.

In the following decades, Wickham served as a mentor to other pioneering farmers who were interested in trying their hand at grape growing, buying their yields for his expanding wine production. In 1995 his son took on the role of winemaker, adding Tularosa Vineyards Winery to the growing list of multi-generational family wineries in New Mexico. Today, the winery still operates at a small capacity but produces more than 3,500 cases annually.


Extract from The wines of Southwest U.S.A. © Jessica Dupuy (Infinite Ideas, 2020)
To read more, buy your copy direct from the Classic Wine Library shop.

Extract: Luxury Wine Marketing by Peter Yeung and Liz Thach MW

19 January 2022 by in Extracts, Lifestyle, Wine and spirits

Luxury wine: luxuriously defined
The French term elevage, meaning to be grown or reared, with regard to winemaking is a good starting point for understanding what luxury wine is. The wine world at the highly commercial end is made up of manufactured commodities, wines made by formula and at industrial scale, often to great effect, but manufactured more than grown. The other extreme is the small farmer, meticulously tending to his or her small plot and “raising” the wines from the vineyard to the cellar to the bottle. Though luxury wine is the opposite of a commercially manufactured product, that still does not fully encapsulate the definition of luxury wine.

In order to define luxury wine, it is useful to begin with some basic definitions of the term “luxury.” Merriam-Webster provides the following:
1. a condition of abundance or great ease and comfort: sumptuous envir­onment // lived in luxury
2. a: something adding to pleasure or comfort but not absolutely necessary //one of life’s luxuries
b: an indulgence in something that provides pleasure, satisfaction, or ease // had the luxury of rejecting a handful of job offers

These definitions showcase that luxury should provide a sense of a sumptuous lifestyle, refinement, privilege, and pleasure. However, it is also instructive to examine luxury from an economic standpoint. In his book Macroeconomic Analysis, Hal Varian states that “a luxury good is a good for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises.” This definition adds the element of high price and scarcity to the mix. Therefore, when all of these concepts are combined, some bound­aries are created around what luxury wine is.


Definition of luxury wine: Luxury wine is of the highest quality, coming from a special place on earth, has an element of scarcity, an elevated price, and provides a sense of privilege and pleasure to the owner.


The six attributes of luxury wine
The above definition can be further explained by delving more deeply into the six attributes of quality, place, scarcity, price, privilege, and pleasure.
1. Highest level of quality – globally recognized for producing a wine of the highest quality that can age and is suitable for cellaring. Must have achieved this for a long period of time with consistency – at least twenty years – proving the unique heritage of the brand.
2. Coming from a special place – recognized as coming from a special wine-grape-growing region with cultural significance. High-quality grape vines can only be grown in unique places in the world that have a special climate and soil. Many of these locations have long been recognized as supreme wine-grape-growing areas and have a strong sense of heritage.
3. Sense of scarcity – part of the branding component of luxury wine is that it is difficult to obtain, which can be developed through actual scarcity (hard to find), perceived scarcity (barriers to purchase), or price (so expensive it feels scarce). Often luxury wine has the ability to achieve higher prices on the secondary market.
4. Elevated price point – a foundational element of luxury wine, high price creates a barrier to purchase, higher perceived quality, and, if sustainable, higher willingness to pay by consumers. Generally speaking, luxury wines should be $100/bottle or greater in US retail.
5. Provides a sense of privilege – part of the exclusivity of luxury, be it from price, scarcity, or the symbolic nature of the brand and product is the status it confers on the owner, or in this case, drinker. This provides a sense of privilege to be able to partake in a wine that few others may have the opportunity to enjoy. The bottles in the cellar are the envy of other wine geeks globally. Luxury, by its definition, is a privilege, and wine is no exception.
6. Provokes pleasure – provides an aesthetically pleasing experience by viewing the bottle/collection and showing it to others. Also provides a hedonistic experience through consumption.

The growing importance of sustainability
Having both the highest level of quality and coming from a special place, luxury wines exhibit a character common amongst many luxury products, which Kapferer and Bastien describe in Luxury Strategy as “timeless” – the ability to be relevant decades from when the product was produced. When this is applied to wine, several elements come into play. The ability to improve with age and be of consistently high quality are both fundamental elements of luxury wine. Being relevant over a sustained period of time, to produce the highest quality, creates the special places where luxury wine is grown. For all those attributes to flow into luxury wine, both the viticultural and winemaking practices must be increasingly sustainable, often incorporating elements of organics, biodynamics, and environmentally sustainable practices. If they are not, the land and the vines will no longer have the energy or the nutrients to consistently, continually, produce the quality necessary for a luxury wine. Interestingly, most luxury wines do not aggressively market themselves as organic or biodynamic, though most utilize those practices, in order to focus on their brand and the quality of their product as opposed to the farming methods.

A similar case can be made for economic sustainability as well. Without generating strong enough returns to survive, the winegrower will no longer be able to continue producing top-quality wine. For luxury wine, this is embedded in the elevated price, as crafting luxury wine with meticulous care often requires a great deal of investment in facilities, tools, and labor.

What luxury wine is not
Just as important to understand what luxury wine is, is to understand what it is not. The world of wine is privy to trends like the fashion industry, technological revolutions on par with the digital revolution for an agricultural industry, and instantaneous hits similar to food fads – yet luxury wine separates itself as being classic and timeless. It may be easy to consider wines marketed with a luxury lifestyle component – advertisements set on yachts or in high-end clubs – as luxury wines, but more often than not they fail to live up to the definition of luxury wine.

The luxury lifestyle
Often, the term luxury and luxury wine are directly associated with a luxurious lifestyle. Many aspiring luxury wine brands believe they must appear to fit in with a lifestyle of private jets, yachts, and twenty-thousand-dollar watches to be a successful luxury wine. However, the two are not always related. Many top Burgundian producers will often profess that their wines are not luxury, that they are farmers, and their wines are merely an expression of the land. In their way, their marketing focuses on the special place where their wines are grown and their focus on making wines of the highest quality. These wines also happen to cost hundreds of dollars, are limited in production, are scarce, and are sought after by a global set of wine collectors. They fit the definition of luxury wine more easily than other wine brands with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets.

The luxurious cult
A common and confusing subset of fine wine is the notion of cult wines. Cult wines have a rabid, loyal following and are generally very small in production, often with fewer than 2,000 cases produced a year. However, it is possible, given enough time and with consistent high quality over a long period of time, that a cult wine can become a luxury wine. Two good examples of this are Napa Valley’s Screaming Eagle and Harlan Estate, which have built their history and heritage and now firmly belong in the luxury category. They meet all the criteria – high quality, from a special place, elevated price, scarcity, aesthetically pleasing, and imparting a sense of privilege. However, there are equally as many cult wines that do not meet the definition but do have scarcity from low production and a loyal following. This could apply to Frank Cornelissen’s wines from Mount Etna in Sicily and Clos de la Roilette in Beaujolais. Their wines are unique, small production, and high quality, but generally not with an elevated price and are generally appreciated by specific niches of consumers. For example, Cornelissen’s wines are natural with no sulfur dioxide used in winemaking and Roilette is a sommelier favorite, partially due to its relative value as a Cru Beaujolais, and would not meet the definition of a luxury wine.


Extract from Luxury Wine Marketing © Peter Yeung and Liz Thach MW (Infinite Ideas, 2019)
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