Business Reality Meets Romantic Winemaking Notions
Szűcs Róbert, Jammertal Wine Estate
Why do winemakers prefer using oak barrels to other types of wood?
Fermentation and/or ageing of wine in small barrels specifically interfere with the type wood they are made of. Most commonly used species are a few kinds of oak. Obviously, winemakers experiment with chestnut, cherry, acacia and mulberry. Technically, a wide spectrum of woods could be used. It is a simple economic issue which prevents winemakers from changing their routine on a larger scale.
Matured wines are intended for the high-end market. Customers around the world have an identifiable, well-established general preference for flavour. Their definition of aroma referred to " big reds " has developed over the decades in connection with ageing in oak barrels. A different type of wood would provide for a significantly different palate for the same wine from a particular terroir. There is no guarantee that such a wine would gain a large-scale of buyers beyond a few fanatics. You can risk a bold try with a few barrels but those would not be sufficient to generate economic benefit. By the time a tiny market segment becomes familiar with the wine, that experimental quantity of couple of hundred bottles will have been sold out. There would not be available more wine of the same batch even if there were demand.
Great business courage and personal commitment is needed to devote a commercially reasonable quantity, say a few tens of thousands of bottles, to such a project. What if the end product is not to consumers’ liking?
The million dollar question is: “ Should a winemaker stick to tried and tested methods that would bring in a predictable income on the end of the day; or make a try on an uncharted terrain of very little reward / risk ratio? "
This kind of attitude must affect more aspects of winemaking than just the barrels used.
Exactly. We often receive almost reproachful questions and comments about why we don’t produce this or that type of wine because the enquirer would gladly make a try on it. Our response is logical: Would you buy all of it at an appropriate price if they were made?
I’ll give you an actual example. Our Pinot Noir 2005 was the only Hungarian wine to win a Gold Medal at the Concours Mondial de Bruxelles in 2009. It was a great wine that had everything which makes Pinot Noir valuable and enjoyable. Yet, in Hungary I would call it a partial success at best. It won professional recognition but was a financial loss. From 2008 onwards, we stopped making single variety Pinot Noir.
Of course, thoroughbred wine professionals never say never. In 2017, we saw an exceptional quality of Pinot Noir harvest coming. We decided not to turn it into rosé as we had done for a decade but into red wine. Instead of producing16,000 bottles of marketable rosé we took chances. Applying strict yield control we used those two hectares of grapes to produce 5,800 bottles of top quality Pinot Noir. Our efforts resulted in a stunning wine, which will be put on the market in early 2021. I’m wondering what the market uptake will be. This wine meets the highest standards from oenological point of view. If it would not draw audience's attention, any further experiments with this variety for the domestic market would be pointless.
The quid pro quo principle applies to winemaking very well.
We started to question our partners in China about their specific market requirements from the beginning. Pretty unusually for wine business we were ready to produce costume made wines for them. It worked out very well. They were ready to invest in terms of consulting and price in return we provided them with very profitable batches of top wines. It is the costumer who takes the most advantages from this kind of cooperation. Thats how we became one of the first and rare designer wineries around the world.
Is that why you do not deal seriously with popular varieties such as Blauer Portugieser and Blaufränkisch?
If these varieties were popular among the majority of costumers they would already have been planted everywhere around the world. Cultivating them is relatively risk free. So why didn’t they become international? The answer is simple: the market does not really want them. In spite of this in the Villány wine region these two varieties have been designated under the law as varieties for “priority” planting to be subsidized. Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon have been exluded from planting subsidies. We kept on growing Merlot and Cabernet, but small vineyard owners with limited budget turned to those subsidized solutions. The whole thing was a serious error made by ignorant decision makers which would have a negative financial effect for decades to come. In a tiny wine region of just over two thousand hectares, encouraging the planting of varieties which are unit for the market is economic nonsense. Although winemaking is a beautiful way of life but is also a tough business which avenges unpreparedness ruthlessly.
Wonderful things can be created from Blaufränkisch variety in a place like Villány with its Sub-Mediterranean climate. But the question keeps hovering: who will foot the bill? Experience shows that no one is really ready to do so. " Cheap " and " low prices " are the expressions which crawled under the skin of average wine drinkers.
If the wine-loving public would rather having a wide spectrum of interesting / intriguing wines on offer they should be prepared for supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of those few outstanding wineries.
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