Michel Rolland

Fame is not a word many winemakers are comfortable with. Given the choice between a day in the cellar and a day with the media, most would chose the former, preferring the cool, familiar confines of their cellar. Unless your name is Michel Rolland. Surely the world's most famous wine consultant, with some 150 clients (115 in his native Bordeaux region alone), this globetrotting Frenchman is as charming and funny as he is talented, and unlike most of his peers, Rolland is an extremely comfortable public speaker.

In the past, Michel Rolland has visited Toronto to promote the eastern Canadian release of a number of wines he either owns outright or co-owns. But it's the body of his work that captured our imagination when we interviewed him in Vancouver in the fall of 2006. That, and the philosophy of the man who has changed the way the world makes wine.

Rolland's arrival in Canada is not sudden, nor is it driven by any listings the monopolies may hand out. He's been quietly working at Mission Hill Family Estate winery in the Okanagan Valley since 2004, where owner Anthony von Mandl and winemaker John Simes have been subtly reshaping the winery's icon red, Oculus. Reshaping may be too strong a word (Rolland himself prefers the term evolution to revolution) but it's safe to say future editions will be more supple, more fruit focused with just a whiff of the savoury notes that identify the peculiarities of south Okanagan terroir.

With Rolland, a relationship is always personal because it is the people that are most important to him; at least after the vineyard work is done. Rolland has worked with larger companies (when we first met it was over a decade ago in the south of France where he was making a super-merlot tagged ‘M' for Robert Skalli), but his projects are almost always about a single wine. Not long after, our paths crossed in Argentina. This time it was at a Nicolas Catena property. Rolland was dissecting some 35 different lots of malbec and merlot for Laura Cantena and her winemaking team as they searched for the secret to better Mendoza red. He has since gone on to own several projects in Mendoza and Salta, no doubt influencing the style of modern-day Argentine red.

Back in the Okanagan, Anthony von Mandl and John Simes are two guys constantly looking for ways to improve their wines through sound, sustainable vineyard and winemaking practices: enter Michel Rolland. Obviously Rolland has a feeling that the terroir and the wine are right and that the end result will be a wine of interest to the world. Stylistically, Rolland and Simes are working toward reds that favour merlot, although in the case of Oculus, Rolland has suggested to me perhaps some syrah is in order too, drawing on its softer tannins and brighter fruit. For the moment it would appear both Simes and von Mandl are willing to listen to Rolland and that likely means a better Oculus in the future.

Rolland wasn't always  famous, even if he grew in up on some pretty hallowed terroir. To hear him tell the story, it's hard to believe he is in British Columbia making wine. "I have lived a very simple life. I grew up in France, in Pomerol mostly, my family has a vineyard in Pomerol (Château Le Bon Pasteur) and so everything began in this place. I don't know why but I love wine since the beginning. I drank wine very early in my life and I still love wine."

Rolland attended the University of Bordeaux to study wine; that is where he met his wife Dany. She was studying medicine at the time but she soon joined Michel on the wine side and not long after they graduated, the pair opened a small laboratory/consulting business on the Right Bank. "It began with 4,000 samples per year", says Rolland. Thirty years later they process 80,000 samples. In those days, Rolland says "advice was neither asked for, nor given. But in time winemaking changed and people were asking more and more for consulting, so I began in Bordeaux and later mostly in France."

Rolland's list of international clients is legendary (to say nothing of their egos). Catena in Argentina, Casa Lapostolle in Chile, Ornellaia in Tuscany, and Harlan Estate, Bryant Family, Araujo and Dalla Valle to name but a few in Napa, yet the winemaker known for his meticulous vineyard demands and supple textures gets on famously with them all.

"At first everyone thinks they know everything about winemaking but after they work with me they learn they don't know anything about wine. Just like me. And so they have to learn their entire life." Rolland has a disarming charm and an openness that is very appealing. In fact, in the controversial documentary film Mondovino, Roland was so agreeable to the inquiries of filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter he was made out to be the Darth Vader of winemaking, the perfect villain for Nossiter's twisted and narrow view of the global wine business.

Anyone who spends time with Rolland, tasting and talking wine, would never mistake him for a poser. In a world where consulting has become fashionable, and make no mistake, there are a lot of wine consultants, Rolland is now one of the oldest and most experienced.

"I have been lucky to be working outside of France, first in California at Simi. Now I consult at many wineries; some say too many." In fact, Rolland works with 150 wineries and he visits each project three times a year. "I'm travelling a lot and working a lot but I'm not so sure that it is really work. My life is wine; I've done it all my life. I do not know if I did well but I feel quite happy."

Rolland's gift is his tasting ability, about which he is very modest. "You know at the beginning we never knew if we were good tasters or bad tasters, but we taste. The most important is to enjoy what you are doing. In fact after many years there are people who think I'm a good taster. I do not know if I'm still a good taster but I love what I'm doing and I'm very involved in seeking out quality." When he opened his wine lab 25 years ago, Rolland freely admits the samples he was analysing and tasting were not very good. It was then he decided to devote his life to helping people make better wine. His passion took him to the vineyard. "I went to the vineyard because it was my future; I was brought up in a vineyard. Certainly I was one of the first oenologists to walk into the vineyard and to begin speaking about viticulture. At the time the winemaker was just in the winery waiting for the grapes, waiting for the harvest but never looking at the vineyard or going to see the grapes. What we have to do to improve, the vineyard management, the whole idea was very new at the time."

After many years of work Rolland concludes that, "there are really not many very good winemakers but rather mostly good grapes. Now I'm still working in the vineyard looking at the vineyard. You can obviously make bad wine with good grapes but it is impossible to make very good wine with bad grapes. So that's why I'm still involved in the vineyard management." As for winemaking, Rolland admits that everything has changed in the last 20 years. "We can't compare the vinification of the early 1980s and now because we changed the whole process or concept, although only step by step, never by revolution. In wine there is never revolution, only evolution. In wine we can only understand what we can do better and we have to try. We have to check if it's good and then we go to another step and it takes time. That's the problem of wine, it is not industrial. We have to feel very well with one process and we can then do another one next year and the wine evolves." Rolland believes we have never seen such quality wine made all over the world. "In the future it will be even more interesting to see the quality and development in the vineyards."

Thinking of his early days in California, he says, it was very different from today, "where everybody is concerned from the beginning about the right vineyards, the right place. When I arrived in the United States I remember my first vineyard visit. On the same piece of land people were planting chardonnay, cabernet sauvignon, merlot, sauvignon and zinfandel and it was not working. We (the French) knew that because of our belief in the existence of terroir. We are speaking sometimes too much about terroir but for chardonnay it is not the same as the terroir for cabernet and nobody was taking care of this.

"At home on the Right Bank of Bordeaux, we grow merlot because a century or two ago our forefathers proved that merlot grew better in this place than cabernet, but cabernet sauvignon is growing 100 kilometres away in the Médoc and growing much better than in Libourne. The only real explanation is terroir."

Rolland works with so many new projects, most of which sell expensive wine. I wondered if he still believes that the best quality wine comes from old vines. "Unfortunately, nothing has changed," says Rolland. "If you want to have the best wine, old vines are always making better wines even if we change completely the quality of the wines coming from young vines." The age old consulting question, about what kind of wine he makes, the wine the owner wants him to make or the wine he thinks the owner should be making? Rolland's answer is, well, all Rolland. "I love people and I love to hear their thoughts and ideas, especially about wine, with one caveat. When they leave the room they walk out the door with my ideas about wine." It is vintage Rolland. Confident, knowledgeable, global and in the end just mysterious enough to be the wine consultant by which all others are measured.

Anthony Gismondi is editor-in-chief of Wine Access magazine and one of Canada's most influential wine critics. A top-rated writer, broadcaster and speaker, his expertise is widely acknowledged throughout the international wine community. A weekly columnist for the Vancouver Sun, Anthony is also co-host of the popular fast-paced live radio show called The Best of Food and Wine with food writer/author and Wine Access food editor Kasey Wilson. In 2002, he launched gismondionwine.com , a comprehensive wine website that contains a large and growing database of wines and stories chronicling his work and adventures in the world of wine.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 2007 issue of Wine Access  magazine.