The Next Big Thing: The Return of Good, Old-Fashioned Winemaking

The future of wine is connection — between winemakers and the land, winemakers and consumers. The future of wine is freedom — freedom from brand restrictions and expensive facilities; the freedom to experience new grapes and wine styles. The future of wine depends on the return of the artisinal craft of winemaking and the unique experience of sharing your wine experiences with friends. The future of wine is all this and more...

When I started to write this article, I couldn’t help but wonder what the late Robert Mondavi would have to say about the “next big thing” in wine. He was always such a curious guy. It has been almost 50 years since he turned the wine world inside out with his then-very modern take on the boutique, or estate, winery concept.

When Robert began, he chose to build his brand by encouraging customers to stop by the winery, take an educational tour and, hopefully, buy a few bottles before they leave. Once he was established, Robert set out to sell California, Napa Valley, a gracious way of life and the odd bottle of Robert Mondavi-brand wine.

My guess is, if he was here today, Robert would be smack in the middle of the social networking craze, investigating the myriad of Internet marketing possibilities and trying to find a way to connect directly with his customers. He might have been the ultimate Tweeter. I can imagine Robert tweeting or Facebooking his followers, using his words to take them on a journey into the vineyards, telling them the story of his prized ToKalon vineyards, the clones he researched, the vines he planted, the spacing, the experiments, the oak barrel trials and much more. No matter where in the world his customers were, they would get the real hands-on Mondavi experience, as if they had just pulled up to the winery’s door.

When, in life, Robert did speak of these things, you couldn’t help but feel his passion — every detail of his life dedicated to wine.

The Direct Connection

In many ways, the next big thing in wine will be exactly that — making the direct connection. It’s going to happen one-on-one, between consumers and wineries, without any gatekeepers (marketers, branders, agents) and other middlemen in the way. It is the new, up-close-and-personal contact that will change the way both wineries and consumers think about wine. Furthermore, going forward, we will see the decline of the brand as a trademark or symbol in favour of the rise of the people who make the wine, and the place where it is grown.

Wine writers and magazines are not going to disappear (at least, I hope not), but the circle of information we are constantly privy to will continue to be broadened by social media and young consumers who are already interacting instantly with their friends, the environment and everything in it. This generation of consumers considers the wine they drink, and more importantly the people who make it, part of their circle.

In order to make this work, and in order for us to get in touch with them, the people who produce wine have to get back in touch themselves. The next big thing in wine demands a return to the basics: a winemaker and his vines. It is not that the players lacks passion but, moving forward, there is a need to combine that passion with a renewed commitment towards making wine that comes from somewhere. We’ll see a return to individual craftsmanship — an auteur approach to winemaking. It is time for small to be big.

Eben Sadie: Rewriting the Modern Story of Wine

I recently had the pleasure of spending time with an example of this future breed of winemaker. North of Paarl, South Africa, in what seems like the middle of nowhere, I met winemaker Eben Sadie, a young man following his passion in a way few winemakers are able. Working with family and a handful of growers, this extraordinary young vintner is rewriting the modern story of wine, one bottle at a time.

We met at his winery on a windswept afternoon in Paardeberg, where tiny, dry-farmed vines were basking in late-day sun, struggling in a dry environment to produce a handful of tiny bunches of fruit. Upon entering his modest winery, I discovered there were more empty bottles of great foreign wine than any one person had a right to consume. “I used to drink a lot of French wine, until 1990. After that, for me, the French wines became too modern,” says Sadie. “Then I started drinking Spanish wines more. I even ended up working in Spain and buying a piece of land in Spain and making a bit of wine there. Then the Spanish became modern. Now I’m drinking southern Italian wine and, I don’t know; if they become modern, then I’ll drink Armenian wine.”

Modern Oenology

Sadie’s take on the flaws of modern oenology is compelling, comparing it to instant coffee. “[Modern winemaking is] very quick. It’s bad, but it is the bad you know, so you drink it all the time. It’s not great," he says. "It doesn’t really complement your life. To make real coffee, you need the beans. You need to know the moisture. You need to have a grinder that grinds it right — not too powdery, not too granular. You need to have the water and the pressure right and if you get it all right, you have coffee — that’s old winemaking.”

While he is a firm believer in allowing the land and the grapes to shine through in the wine, unhindered by a winemaker’s tinkering, Sadie admits there is a fine balance that needs to be struck. “You need clean winemaking, because if you have faults all the time in your wine, you don’t have terroir,” he says. “But then if you make it like beer in a factory, you also do not have terroir. Somehow you need to be in the middle. Still, I’m more leaning left than right — my brain doesn’t work factory-style.”

Emphasizing the Varietal vs. the Region

If the quality and profile of a wine begins in the land, then surely the next important factor is the grape itself. Traditionally, Old World wine places an equal, if not greater, focus on the region where the wine is grown then on the specific grapes that are in it. When looking at a bottle of Bordeaux, we don't expect a list of varietals on the label. But the New World has generally shucked this model, preferring instead to focus on specific grape varietals — at times, ignoring the great range of flavour and expression those varietals can produce based on where they are grown and how they are cultivated.

Despite this emphasis on the grape, Sadie believes New World winemakers are being short-sighted. “The problem with varietal wine and the New World is we have populated the place with five grapes," Sadie explains." A small country like Portugal has 250 grapes, Greece has 800, Italy has even more. But we say, for the whole New World with five grapes, we will find the definition of our terroir. Then we put a lot of wood in it and we pick it ripe and the whole thing becomes the same.”

Sadie hopes to break away from this model with his own wines, something that is a possibility for a smaller winery. “I don’t have 300,000 bottles. I have 30,000 or 40,000 bottles," he says. "I can live [on] it, and my sister can live [on] it, and one or two other people can make a living, too.”

The Paardeberg Region

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to choosing a site for his own wine, Sadie has chosen wisely, with several vineyards planted around the Paardeberg region. Each site was specifically chosen for soil and optimum growing conditions. He chose to settle in the Paardeberg region because of the dry climate and old vines. Water and young vines are two “I don’t have one place where I pick my vineyards. It would take us a whole day to visit them,” says Sadie. “At Paardeberg, there is power. The soils are all granite soils and it is home to the highest per capita of old vineyards in South Africa, and there is no water.”

Paardeberg’s diverse landscape also provides him with access to schist with a lot of silica; in the north of the region, he has vines planted on two ridges with dark red clay, like the terra rossa in Barossa, or the clay in Bulgaria, or Toscana and Pomerol. These give him structure. There are also vineyards on volcanic soil and vineyards on quartz. “This is why I’m here — it’s the only appellation that has all these soils. They are the great soils of wine. It is very rare and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what is going on.”

The Eben Sadie Winemaking Process

For his signature bottles, Columella and Palladius, the trip grapes take from the vine is short. They are hand-picked and moved straight into the tanks. There are no pumps; it’s all gravity-fed.

Sadie is eschewing oak because he is “not sure what a French tree has to do with terroir” in South Africa. He’s moving into larger wooden tanks, concrete eggs and even old amphorae. In the end, he wants to make the transition from foreign oak tanks to something more local.

Eventually, Sadie plans to make his wine without electricity, like the Romans did. For him, the next big thing is rediscovering the little things, once widely known and lost many centuries ago. He wants to go back to the beginning, to redefine wine and winemaking by returning to the roots of the practice. For Sadie, the goal is to do things in a hands-on, repeatable and sustainable way.

Eben Sadie is just one winemaker, but I hope his independent way of thinking will inspire the international wine community to examine its approach to wine. There is no good reason for winegrowers to ape each other right down to using the same clones of fruit, the same yeasts, the same barrels and the same marketing message. It’s time for all of us discover our terroir before it is lost forever.