The Incredible Crayères

In the 4^th century, in order to have enough stone to construct Reims (the main town in the Champagne region), the Romans dug three hundred immensely deep quarries in the region’s famous chalky rock. These vertical chalk pits, called crayères, are used today by the houses to age Champagne. They are construction miracles that seem to defy physics, and descending into their eerily quiet, cold, dark, humid chambers is an otherworldly experience that no wine lover should miss. Because the best chalk was often well underground, many crayères go down as far as 120 feet (37 meters). They are shaped like pyramids, so the deepest parts of the crayères are also the widest and the tops of the pits are narrow. This shape limited air exposure in the quarry and kept the chalk moist and soft, thus easier to cut into large construction blocks. During World War I, when Reims was extensively bombed, about 20,000 people lived in the dark crayères where no sunlight penetrates for years. During this time, some of the crayères under Veuve Clicquot and Ruinart were makeshift hospitals, and under Pommery were a school.

Malbec Around the World

Sunday is International Malbec Day. Herewith, some information on the grape variety. Malbec is indigenous to southwestern France, where it is known by its original name: Côt. Côt (Malbec) is the offspring of two obscure French grapes—Magdeleine Noire des Charentes and Prunelard. While Côt/Malbec is one of the five grapes that can be legally blended to make red Bordeaux, plantings of it in Bordeaux have been declining for a long time. In the mid-nineteenth century, the grape was brought from Bordeaux to Argentina where it is now the leading grape for fine red wines. There, Malbec is grown in the dry, sunny, extremely high-altitude vineyards that, like steps, descend from the peaks of the Andes. And, in contrast to Bordeaux, Malbec in Argentina is almost always made as a single varietal, rather than as part of a blend. Malbec tends to be low in acidity and slightly less tannic than Cabernet Sauvignon. Indeed, it’s prized for its soft, mouthfilling texture (the wine equivalent of molten chocolate cake), its deep inky color, and its plummy, mocha, and earthy aromas and flavors.

The Godfather of Fermentation

On this day in April in 1858, Louis Pasteur published his findings on fermentation, significantly advancing the science of winemaking. Pasteur’s research in the 1850’s led to the discovery of single-celled fungi called yeasts which metabolized grape sugars, resulting in alcohol. Previously, winemakers understood very little about the chemical mechanisms behind fermentation. Pasteur also solved one of the food industry’s biggest economic problems: spoilage. He recommended a gentle heating process—it would later be named pasteurization after him—that stopped bacteria from growing.

The Chinese in Wine Country

Chinese New Year begins next week, so we wanted to share some of the little-known contributions that the Chinese made to the early California wine industry. It is not a story that makes the industry proud. With the Gold Rush of 1849, Chinese immigrants began to come to California in large numbers. Many were poor laborers and farmers who, after working in the mines, and helping to build the transcontinental railroad, went to work for the new winery owners in Sonoma and Napa. From the 1860s to the 1880s, Chinese vineyard workers cleared fields, planted vineyards, built wineries, harvested grapes, and dug by-hand many of northern California’s most impressive underground cellars, including parts of the cellars at Schramsberg and Buena Vista.

A section of Napa Valley’s prestigious Meadowood resort was once a Chinese camp where several hundred Chinese vineyard workers lived. These workers were treated poorly and paid terribly. A few miles away, at the grand, historic winery Inglenook, handwritten payroll ledgers from the 1870s show Chinese winery workers were paid considerably less per hour than their fellow workers. According to the historian Jack Chen, an economic crisis in the late 1870s resulted in agitation against Chinese labor, and ultimately in the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882. By 1890, in search of better, safer conditions, most of the Chinese in wine California country had fled.

Lanzarote—Hit by a Thousand Meteorites?

Lanzarote, the easternmost island of Spain’s Canary Islands, is known for its startling landscape of ten thousand curious, dark pits spaced closely together. From a distance, the scene looks as if thousands of meteorites have hit the region. But in fact, these are some of the most bizarre vineyards in the world—vineyards that are an ingenious response to the island itself.

Lanzarote, and its most important wine district, La Geria, lie just 78 miles off the coast of Africa. The rainfall here is less than in some parts of the Sahara Desert. In the 1700s, a volcanic eruption covered the island, including the best farming land, with ash and lava. Instead of giving up, local farmers invented a dry cultivation method called enarenado (literally, “covered with sand”). As it turns out, the island’s volcanic soil, called picón, is extremely good at absorbing and retaining moisture from the night air.

Today, Lanzarote’s vineyards are planted primarily with Malvasia grapes. Indeed, Malvasia, along with Listan Prieto (known as Mission in the United States) were the grapes brought by Spanish explorers from the Canary Islands to Mexico in the 1500s. From Mexico, these grapes became the foundation of the wine industries in Chile, Argentina, and the U.S.

The Repeal of Prohibition— This Week 88 Years Ago

This week in 1933 on the 5^th of December the 21^st Amendment was ratified formally ending Prohibition. The 13-year social experiment in forced abstinence was, by all measures, a failure. Prohibition quashed the country’s once-promising future as a wine-drinking culture and left the U.S. wine industry crippled. It took pioneers such as Cesare Mondavi, Louis M. Martini, the Beringer family, and Hans Kornell to help attempt to rebuild the California wine industry to its pre-Prohibition success. Meanwhile, during Prohibition, the number of saloons and speakeasies in New York City alone rose to 32,000.

To Wine, or Not to Wine—That is the Question

While it’s tempting to assume that, when it comes to wine, the French invented almost everything, there’s one pursuit they largely overlooked: wine writing. For that, we have to thank the ancient Greek and Roman writers, then later, the English. The first book on wine in the English language was A New Boke of the Natures and Properties of All Wines, written in 1568 by William Turner. Turner’s book is thought to have been a guide for William Shakespeare, who laced his texts with numerous references to wine. Then, during the 18th century, dozens of major wine books were written—many of them, interestingly, by English physicians.

A Remarkable Ascent

Curiously, some of the world’s most powerful organizations start out the most humbly.

In the world of wine, there’s no better example than the Napa Valley Vintners which began 77 years ago as a modest association of just seven members. The year was 1944 and their agreement, pecked out on an old manual typewriter, listed five ways in which they could help one another. The first one— “to advance the interests of the Napa Valley through publicity, advertising and such other methods as may seem best…”—has been, by any measure, wildly successful. Today some 500 members of the association work to continue to achieve that purpose. Not surprisingly, the initial Napa Valley Vintners meeting happened over lunch with bottles of wine from the late 1930s and early 1940s. (One hopes the legendary 1941 Inglenook—a wine of the century—was there). The vintner’s spirit of camaraderie and shared determination must have been impressive for at the time the Napa Valley was a rural backwater better known for prunes and cattle than Cabernet. The valley has clearly changed. Enormous strides have been made in the last seven decades. And yet the organization that Joe Heitz (NVV Board Chair 1970-1971) described as “a great moving force to keep us working together,” remains as vital as ever.

The Original Seven

The original seven member wineries of the Napa Valley Vintners Association were:

• Beaulieu Vineyard
• Larkmead Vineyards
• Napa Valley Cooperative Winery
• Mondavi & Sons
• Inglenook
• Louis M. Martini Winery
• Louis Stralla