Marcia and I spent the turn of the year in the Serra Gaucha, the main wine producing region of Brazil, in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, bordering Argentina and Uruguay. Besides visiting a part of the country to which I had never been, I was curious to get a sense of where the Brazilian wine industry is heading, since it is evolving rapidly.
Since expectations were not particularly high for the wine, we spent a lot of time on other things, but I managed to produce 73 tasting notes from 12 wineries. I wrote a long (23 page) trip report for my Brazilian message board, so have pointers in the unlikely event any of you ever get down there. In English, I thought I’d summarize my findings and raise some interesting issues that came up.
The modern Brazilian wine industry dates from around 1999, so it’s still in its infancy. Most of the wines are produced by descendants of Italian immigrants, who came to this region in the late 19th century. Sparklers have become quite popular over the last 10 years and are quite decent, probably the only area where Brazil seems to be punching above its weight at the moment. But we focused on still wines, for which there are already a few large producers (Miolo and Salton), several mid-tier firms, plus a few boutiques and a smattering of garagistes. The wines we tasted at the boutique and higher levels were, at best, technically correct and, at most, good cost/benefits. However, I was surprised to find that two garagistes (that have already become somewhat well-known in the small Brazilian wine geek circle) are producing “world class” wines, so the most important conclusion of the trip was that this is possible in Brazil. Their names are Vilmar Bettu and Marco Danielle. There are a few similarities – both are of Italian origin and use little or no SO2 – but, for the most part, they are a study in contrasts, evidence that there is no “right way” to make wine.
Bettu is around 60, a curious hillbilly mix of soft-spoken, humble, eccentric and stubborn, and has been making wine in his farm since the early 1980s. He grows over 30 varietals and uses whichever ones ripen adequately each given year to make different mono-varietals and blends (the latter can be whimsical or driven by what’s available). There is no de-stemming and all bunches are foot stomped by the family. The resulting must is filtered with sieves and stored in old wooden barrels after achieving considerable extraction. We spent five memorable hours at his house, slowly tasting through 13 wines, several of which were outstanding, particularly a nebbiolo, a touriga nacional, and a rose made from merlot.
Danielle is around 40, a sophisticated former professional photographer who began to make wine recently, in 2002, after a period of living in Paris. He is outspoken, an evangelist for his wines and his approach to making them, and has ruffled many feathers by self-propagandizing with what is seen as unbecoming loudness. He works mostly with purchased grapes, de-stemmed by hand at low temperatures, using sterile equipment and maximum hygiene in order to minimize added SO2. He is not yet organic or biodynamic because he has to buy his grapes, but he recently acquired a vineyard and is headed that way. He is familiar with the latest trends in French natural wine, and it was an ear-opener to hear about the drawbacks that are the flip side of the benefits of SO2. We had dinner with Danielle and his charming wife at a restaurant, where we tasted barrel samples from his new vineyard and some of his regular wines, all of which lay somewhere between very promising and excellent. Unlike Bettu, Danielle only uses a few varietals, all of them French (CS, CF, Merlot, Tannat and Chardonnay), as monos or blends. He hopes to make a pinot noir soon.
Random musings spurred by the trip:
I tasted some pretty unusual varietals, like ancelotta and marselan (a clone of grenache and cabernet sauvignon recently developed near Marseilles, hence the name). Why naturally conservative descendants of Italian immigrants are so willing to experiment with odd grapes and clones is a mystery. Perhaps because Brazil doesn‘t yet have a wine identity, or a characteristic grape, so there’s nothing to be lost by shooting right and left, from the hip, hoping something will stick.
The second largest immigrant community is German, yet practically no Riesling is grown. The immigrants were poor, and their descendants are more inclined towards beer, but this still seems like untapped potential.
White wine still gets a bad rap compared to red in a climate where it often makes a whole lot more sense.
There are hotter regions being developed, closer to the Argentine and Uruguayan border, that yield more mature grapes. These are being increasingly used to produce international style wines with super mature grapes to compete with the Andean model. Wasn’t too happy about that.
Found very few pinot noirs, though also more suitable drinking in hotter weather. Wasn’t too happy about that either.
Many unoaked chardonnays are being made as poolside sippers because it’s the only grape with significant name recognition, when other grapes are probably better suited for that function.
In a different part of Brazil – the arid and very hot northeast – there are a few projects making wine all year round. These places have no seasons, so vines yield 2.5 harvests per year, and a hormone made by BASF is used to regulate their cycles so they all produce at the same time. The resulting wine is an impressively decent local version of two buck chuck, but the hormone thing is scary. Just ain’t natural…
I did my first sabering (Freudian slip, first I wrote sobering). Fun!
Since Brazilian wine is seldom covered by WS or WA, I was spared the scores of what we were tasting, but the enthusiastic young winery employees would often spell out the smells and tastes we were supposed to experience. It’s hard to say, in a nice way, “spare me, please!”
Among other things, I came out of the experience more interested in exploring wines made with little or no SO2, not for any doctrinaire reason, just out of curiosity. I want to check out the wines of Claude Courtois and his Cailloux du Paradis and the Gang of Five in Beaujolais (Thevenet, Lapierre, Foilard, etc.). Though these wines are fragile, there has been something fresh and snappy about the ones I’ve tasted (as if SO2 obtained longevity in exchange for a kind of initial dormancy, like wine on Prozac) and they seem to evolve more rapidly and interestingly in the glass and become drinkable much sooner. Though I find the “grape in a bottle” school of wine-that-makes-itself a bit disingenuous, I find some specific reductionist ideas very interesting (ditto for wines made from ungrafted vines).
