Taste the Difference Old Vine Garnacha, Calatayud, Spain 2019 (£10, Sainsbury’s) Winemakers love old vines for many reasons. They love them for the history and continuity they represent. They love them for the extra depth of flavour and natural balance their grapes seem to deliver (in wines such as Sainsbury’s vividly brambly northern Spanish red). They even love them for the way they look: the roughly wrinkled bark of their twisted trunks inspiring a certain anthropomorphic association with the wisdom of elders. Perhaps most importantly and urgently of all however – not least in this unceasingly baking northern hemisphere summer – winemakers love older vines for the way they cope with the increasingly demented weather patterns brought about by the climate crisis. This last idea was the subject of a fascinating article on wine lovers’ website jancisrobinson.com earlier this month, in which the wine writer Tamlyn Currin gathered a wealth of first-person testimony from winemakers all over the world who have discovered that their older vines (35 years and older) cope far better with extreme heat and drought (as well as frost, flooding and disease pressure) than younger plants.
Bellingham The Bernard Series Old Vine Chenin Blanc, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2020 (£11, Tesco) Why do old vines seem so much more resilient? Currin’s piece posits a handful of hypotheses, starting with the deeper roots that old vines have when compared to their younger peers – the consequence of a life without irrigation in which the vines have been forced to burrow deep down to find their water supply from the moment they were planted. Other possibilities, which Currin concedes require greater study, take in genetics, the complex interactions with fungus in old vines’ root systems, their structure and the possibility that, in Currin’s words, “like trees, vines ‘learn’ with time and age, and can even ‘support’ each other”. Whatever the reason, there is a gathering consensus in the wine world that old vines will have an essential role to play in wine production as the climate crisis worsens – a notion that makes vines such as the 40-year-olds used to make Bellingham’s magnificently rich, complex, toasty, tropically fruited Cape Chenin seem all the more valuable.
Pedro Parra Imaginador, Itata, Chile 2019 (from £18.16, thefinewinecompany.co.uk; whiskyexchange.com; camvino.co.uk) The team at jancisrobinson.com has played a significant part in raising awareness of the value of old vines, and building a coalition to protect them, with their most significant contribution being their old vine register, a vast and growing database of 35+-year-old vineyards. Credit for the current conservationist mood must also go to the Old Vine Conference, an organisation that has brought together winemakers, winegrowers, merchants and journalists to discuss and share ideas about how best to protect these precious resources. There’s something hearteningly principled about the development: low-yielding old vines tend to be much less profitable than high-yielding young vines. But we shouldn’t underestimate the persuasive power of the sheer deliciousness of the best old-vine wines in rallying the hedonistic wine world to the cause. Chilean soil expert and wine producer Pedro Parra’s enchanting light red, with its flow of rosehip, blood orange, and smoky-meaty notes, for example, is a testament to the gathered strength of cinsault vines planted on the rocky granitic soils of Chile’s Itata Valley more than 50 years ago.
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