Great Successions in Wine

GREAT SUCCESSIONS

IN WINE

Taking over the reins of their family’s heritage-imbued wineries from Champagne to California, next-gen vintners are forging new paths with eco-conscious production, stepped-up scienti c acumen and, above all, exciting vintages.

By Je rey T Iverson

Illustrations by DANILO AGUTOLI

An art as old as civilisation itself, viticulture has evolved alongside humankind for millennia. From a seed and soil came a world with its own rules and rhythms, those of bud break and harvest, of fermentation and bottle ageing. As those who dedicate their lives to winemaking will tell you, it’s a world which alters one’s very conception of time – a sentiment felt most keenly at multigenerational, family-owned wineries, where simply drawing up a planting rotation plan presumes the accord of yetunborn progeny. For Murray Barlow, whose family owns South Africa’s legendary Rustenberg estate, founded in 1682, viticulture is a lesson in humility, in which a winemaker’s lifetime is but one small cycle within larger ones. “In wine, nothing is finite,” he muses. “I’m not going to hand this estate over to the next generation at the end of my career and say, ‘OK, the work is done.’ Winemaking is a cycle, and it just keeps turning.”

But since the turn of the 21st century, it seems that cycle has quickened. “Wine is changing today because our cultures, our societies have changed so enormously,” says the globetrotting sommelier Enrico Bernardo, 2004 Best Sommelier of the World. “The exchange of information has accelerated, and people everywhere have become far more connected. In the wine world, young winemakers are studying in countries around the globe for the first time and bringing new ideas home; knowledge is being shared in much more transversal, horizontal ways today compared to even 20 years ago when it was far more father-to-son.” For the next generation, it’s a new paradigm which has seen successions at great estates playing out in exciting new ways, with both respect and revamping, continuity and clashes. “The world is

evolving very quickly,” says Aly Wente O’Neal, a fifthgeneration winemaker at California’s Wente Vineyards, the oldest family-owned winery in the United States. “Our challenge is, how are we going to take this historic legacy we have of 140 years of winemaking and continue to appeal to new generations moving forward?”

Guillaume Selosse, who in 2018 became the third generation to head Domaine Jacques Selosse, knows about shouldering a great legacy in an era of great change. Starting in 1974, his father Anselme transformed the family estate into the most influential, iconoclastic name in Champagne, as the first to bring Burgundy terroir philosophy and winemaking techniques to the region. “His neighbours took him for a madman because his methods were revolutionary, but still it was a gentler era, there was no social media and it was easier to be entirely focused on nature and the vineyard,” says Guillaume. “Today, it’s almost oppressive how accessible and solicited we are as winemakers –WhatsApp, text messages, email, Instagram …”

But Selosse admits hyperconnectivity is part of his work today, as he regularly exchanges and travels with a network of wine professionals he befriended during his oenology studies in Bordeaux. “Unlike my father, who is very solitary and often happiest deep in his books, I read a bit less, but I’m much more surrounded by friends in wine,” he says. “My passion is visiting wineries around the world. Whenever I come home my head is buzzing with ideas for experiments.” Indulging those passions also prepared him for the handover, having backpacked across Australia for a year and, since 2012, creating new champagnes under a separate label, Guillaume S.

In wine, nothing is nite. I’m not going to hand this estate over to the next generation at the end of my career and say, ‘OK, the work is done.’ Winemaking is a cycle, and it just keeps turning

— Murray Barlow

With his cuvée Largillier, he’d masterfully push his father’s method for lees ageing to new heights – 36 months in barrels and a year in tanks – distinguishing himself as a brilliant winemaker in his own right.

Sons have always sought emancipation from fathers, but never before have young winemakers had such access to expertise outside the family. For his master’s in oenology, Murray Barlow left Stellenbosch and headed across the world to the University of Adelaide, with its cutting-edge wine-focused Waite Research Institute. He’d study alongside Israelis, Americans, Canadians, Indians and New Zealanders, future wine professionals who now constitute a personal brain trust which Barlow can tap anytime. “If I have a question about a type of barrel, a certain clone of a variety, a disease or any problem, invariably I’m not the first person to have seen it. So that network is invaluable.” Returning home in 2012, Barlow was named Rustenberg’s cellar master, though some considered him too green for the challenge. The following vintage, he was named South Africa’s Young Winemaker of the Year by Diners Club International.

Like Barlow, who came home to a winery in need of consolidation following a post-apartheid boom, in 2007, Riccardo Pasqua joined Pasqua Vigneti e Cantine, a large Veronese winery founded by his grandfather in 1925, at a turning point. “I arrived during a period of difficulty … our company had become just one of many Italian wineries with a good reputation, but without that sparkle that makes it stand out.” In 2009, Riccardo headed to New York to help Pasqua conquer the US market for the first time, and discovered his entrepreneurial genes. “It changed my life,” he recalls. “The most significant thing I brought back was the conviction that we should not be scared of dreaming big, which is a capacity we too often lack in Italy. For me, it was the first injection of that sparkle I’d been seeking, which led to Pasqua becoming what it is today.” In 2015, Riccardo was named Pasqua’s CEO and began developing a new series of wines, from its PassioneSentimento (a wonderfully fresh, modern expression of the traditional appassimento/dried-berry technique), to its cheekily named, multivintage-blend white soave, “Hey French You Could Have Made This But You Didn’t”, to its austere, eminently complex amarone “Mai Dire Mai” – a revolution in an era of overdone, opulent amarones. The wines conquered the traditional

wine press, but also the rising class of social media wine influencers, which Pasqua has aggressively courted from Twitter to TikTok.

Today, Pasqua styles itself as the “House of Unconventional”, supporting the arts, and with poet Arch Hades of Instagram fame as a brand ambassador. What does this have to do with selling wine? Ask Aly Wente O’Neal, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Wente Vineyards, the California estate her ancestors founded in 1883. “I’ve been pushing us to think differently, much like in the world of spirits, where they’re showing a lifestyle, and how a brand can embody your personality, how you want to live,” she says. “We can’t only talk about the past. Our history is great and it gives authenticity to our brand, but I don’t know that it’s going to get a Gen Z to drink our wines.” Wente Vineyards’ online platform portrays an estate with a carpe diem attitude, dedicated to food and nature but also family and sustainability – values they live daily. In 2022, they were awarded the California Wine Institute’s Green Medal Leader Award for environmentally sound, socially equitable and economically viable practices.

Sustainability, climate change – these are challenges now shared by estates across the globe. Indeed, on many levels, the line between the Old World and New World of wine is now blurring. “Traditionally, New World signified big, fruity, high-alcohol wines, and Old World suggested more savoury, moderate alcohol, leaner wines, but that’s all been turned on its head,” says Murray Barlow. “Plenty of bordeaux exceeds 14 per cent alcohol today, while in places like Australia, there’s a move away from that very ripe, extracted style back to something far more elegant and subtle.”

In the Old World, such qualities are often attributed to terroir, a French concept, and yet today arguably the preeminent authority on terroir is an Argentinian – Dr Laura Catena, a Harvard-educated biologist and the fourth-generation head of Mendoza’s Bodega Catena Zapata. Laura founded the Catena Institute of Wine, which in 2021 published a study in Scientific Reports said to “irrefutably prove the existence of terroir” by comparing the phenolic composition of wines from 23 distinct parcels across Mendoza over three vintages. The wine world may be turning upside down, but today’s crop of winemakers hasn’t forgotten the primacy of soil.

THE N EW G UARD

FRANCE

DOMAINE

DIDIER DAGUENEAU

BLANC ETC… 2019 VIN DE FRANCE

Didier Dagueneau, the most celebrated winemaker of the Loire’s Pouilly Fumé appellation, died in a tragic plane accident in 2008. Few imagined anyone could be capable of carrying on the legacy of this sauvignon blanc master, a man who revolutionised both viticulture and winemaking in the Loire Valley. Yet that’s precisely what Didier’s 25-year-old son Louis-Benjamin Dagueneau did, taking over the estate with his sister Charlotte, and only raising the bar higher. In 2016, at 33 years old, he was named winemaker of the year by France’s leading industry magazine, Revue du Vin de France. In 2019, Louis-Benjamin also raised eyebrows for battling with French labelling authorities for excluding one of his wines from the appellation as atypical. Finally, he decided to label his wines Vin de France, forsaking the Pouilly Fumé appellation his father once embodied. His round, full-bodied, age-worthy cuvée “Blanc Fumée” was reborn as Blanc Etc..., a nod to Serge Gainsbourg’s scandalous hit “Aux armes, etc…”, a reggae rendition of France’s national anthem intended as a snub to the establishment. Louis-Benjamin’s iconoclastic father would have approved.

WEINGUT VON HÖVEL SCHARZHOFBERGER GROSSES GEWÄCHS (GRAND CRU) 2020 DRY RIESLING

Distance makes the heart grow fonder – so it was for Maximilian von Kunow, the seventh-generation head of Weingut von Hövel, an estate founded in the Saar valley in 1803 and one of the few to own vines on Germany’s most famous slope – Scharzhofberg, the temple of riesling. After his winemaking studies, Maximilian left to work at estates from the United States to South Africa. Along the way, he came to know his palate – preferring wines made using minimal oenological intervention – and realise how lucky he was. “The chance to make wine on the Scharzhofberg is beyond words, it’s like being allowed to make a La Tâche,” he says. “Nowhere else in the world can you produce so many different riesling styles on one hill.” Returning to head Von Hövel in 2010, Maximilian expanded his range from this slope, renowned for its wines bottled at varying levels of residual sugar, by creating dry wines. To taste his acclaimed Scharzhofberger Grosses Gewächs (Grand Cru), a dry riesling embodying the Scharzhofberg’s exquisite saltiness and cassis and gooseberry aromas, we understand why.

BODEGA CATENA ZAPATA ADRIANNA VINEYARD, MUNDUS BACILLUS TERRAE, 2018 MALBEC

Founded in 1902, Bodega Catena Zapata is Argentina’s oldest family-owned winery, today managed by fourth-generation winemaker Dr Laura Catena. Synonymous with the rebirth of malbec, it was under Laura’s father Nicolás the estate first earned its reputation. Inspired by the California winemakers who shocked France’s greatest estates in the Judgment of Paris tasting, he sought to reveal the potential of Argentina to make wines of complexity and freshness, leading to his planting Mendoza’s first high-altitude malbec vineyards, including the Adrianna vineyard, now known as “South America’s Grand Cru”. As a Harvard-educated biologist and physician, Laura has intensely researched these high-altitude vineyards, where the amplitude between day and night temperatures increases, and the wines develop disproportionately higher levels of tannins, adding to their power, texture and richness. The vineyard’s limestone soils, never tainted by pesticides, are particularly rich in rhizobacteria, the micro-organisms that help vine roots absorb nutrients. Thus, the name “mundus bacillus terrae” or “elegant microbes of the earth” was given to Adrianna’s remarkable malbec cuvée, a “deep, decadent red” for which critic James Suckling gave 98 points.

The proof, as always, is in the bottle – and here are nine remarkable wines, representing fresh takes on old terroirs by next-generation winemakers. By Je rey T Iverson

GERMANY

ARGENTINA

FRANCE ITALY USA

CHÂTEAU PALMER CHÂTEAU PALMER, 2018 MARGAUX

Château Palmer has ranked among the rare family-run grand crus, co-owned by the Mähler-Besses and Sichels, since 1938. In 2004, the families stunned the traditionalist Bordeaux wine world by naming 34-year-old winemaker Thomas Duroux their CEO before hiring the 30-year-old Sabrina Pernet as technical director in 2007. The team would prove remarkably innovative, prioritising research and development, scorning pesticides and developing a bespoke, holistic vision of viticulture which has allowed them to fully express the character of their parcels – and create some of the most critically acclaimed bordeaux in recent years. “Unquestionably Château Palmer’s greatest asset is that it’s owned by people who are capable of working together and looking far ahead,” says Duroux. “Everything that we have done over the last fifteen years at Château Palmer is revelatory of their uncommon open-mindedness and capacity to be visionary.” Their 2018 Château Palmer, born of a vintage plagued by mildew but saved by steadfast vignerons and a hot summer, earned 100 points from critics like Antonio Galloni, stunned by the depth and voluptuousness of a “truly magical wine”.

PASQUA VIGNETI E CANTINE MAI DIRE MAI, 2012 AMARONE

Founded in 1925 in Verona, Pasqua Vigneti e Cantine is a historic winery which is undergoing a renaissance under its third-generation CEO, Riccardo Pasqua. Today styled as the “House of the Unconventional”, its wines are rhyming innovation with historic expertise and terroir. Particularly emblematic of this rebirth is Pasqua’s Amarone, Mai dire Mai, from its Montevegro vineyard, which turned on its head the prevailing Amarone style of opulence and high residual sugar. “This Amarone embodies everything we are,” says Riccardo. “Mai Dire Mai was unconventional from its first vintage. It was the first Amarone of a new style – dry to the bone, aristocratic, vertical ... The project was to bring Amarone back to its terroir, to make a wine that expresses not just the appassimento grape-drying technique but the personality of this soil. It’s a lean, elegant, agile wine, which most importantly boasts ageing potential on a par with the world’s greatest wines.” In 2022, the 2012 Mai Dire Mai, a highly concentrated vintage with structure, elegance and strength, was named among Decanter’s Wines of the Year, awarded 96 points.

WENTE VINEYARDS NTH DEGREE

CHARDONNAY, 2019 LIVERMORE VALLEY

Founded in 1883, Wente Vineyards is the oldest continuously operated, family-owned winery in the United States. To say it has shaped the history of American wine is no hyperbole. In 1912, the family imported chardonnay cuttings from France, then selected and grafted the best-performing vines to create what became known as the “Wente clone”. Today, more than 75 per cent of all California chardonnay – the country’s most emblematic wine – stems back to the Wente clone. Wente’s fifth-generation winemaker Karl D Wente currently produces acclaimed chardonnays at every price point, culminating with the nth Degree, a limited production cuvée from the Livermore Valley vineyards where the descendants of the original Wente chardonnay still grow. The vines were literally farmed to the nth degree, with meticulous pruning and harvesting at optimal ripeness in the early morning. Barrel fermented for 11 months with 100 per cent malolactic fermentation and aged sur lie with weekly battonage, the result is a full-bodied chardonnay with a complex nose of ripe apple, apricot and nutmeg, and a palate of tropical fruit, graham and clove.

RUSTENBERG WINES PETER BARLOW CABERNET SAUVIGNON, 2019 STELLENBOSCH

Founded in 1682 and owned since 1941 by the Barlow family, Rustenberg Wines is run by third-generation winemaker Murray Barlow, who studied oenology in Australia. Murray brought a modern perspective to this historic winery, focusing the estate towards proven varietals on perfectly matched vineyard sites while taking a less interventionist approach in the winery (limited new oak, no added enzymes) – efforts epitomised by his Peter Barlow Cabernet Sauvignon, from the estate’s oldest vineyard. “It’s an amazing vineyard,” he muses. “The fruit comes in and it’s yours to mess up. The old way of thinking was, we must replicate the same style every year. But with this wine, I decided to tell the story of the vintage and own it – to respect that we’ve been given that vintage, and simply guide it along without trying to put too much of your own imprint. Some vintages are cool, the wine won’t be as bombastic, others are warm and concentrated, and you’ll have a blockbuster.” As for the 2019 vintage, a powerful, richly layered wine of concentrated cassis, black cherries and herbaceous notes, in 2022 Master of Wine Tim Atkin named it one of the wines of the year, awarding it 95 points.

YALUMBA THE VIRGILIUS 2019

The Hill-Smith family has owned the Barossa Valley’s Yalumba winery for over 170 years. Today, chairman Robert HillSmith is grooming the sixth generation – his daughter Jessica Hill-Smith recently joined Yalumba’s marketing team. Ever a man of vision, Robert established Australia’s First Families of Wine, a group promoting the savoir-faire of the country’s 10 most iconic, family-owned wineries in 2009. But perhaps his most visionary project was to pioneer viognier in Australia in 1980, a challenging grape which had never flourished outside the Northern Rhône. In a “labour of love” across decades, he oversaw viognier’s establishment on Eden Valley’s cool elevated slopes. Today, with veteran winemaker Louisa Rose, they’ve revealed viognier’s true potential here with The Virgilius, Yalumba’s flagship white wine, wild fermented in old French oak. The James Halliday Wine Companion, Australia’s leading wine guide, awarded the 2019 97 points, writing, “Yalumba has firmly positioned itself at the pointy end of the Australian viognier hierarchy.” A steely, complex, textural wine for connoisseurs of the mysterious alchemy arising from the fortuitous meeting between a grape and a terroir.

CHAMPAGNE GUILLAUME S. LARGILLIER, 2018 EXTRA-BRUT CHAMPAGNE

Anselme Selosse revolutionised champagne by importing Burgundian terroir philosophy and winemaking techniques to create singlevineyard champagnes of never-before-seen richness. Yet when Anselme passed the torch to his son Guillaume in 2018, wine lovers were hardly disconcerted – that’s because, since 2009, he has been making extraordinary champagne under a separate label, Guillaume S. “It’s the story of my youth,” he muses. “Guillaume S was about asserting my freedom, experimenting and getting to know my own palate.” After “Au Dessus du Gros Mont”, from a microvineyard of old chardonnay his grandmother bequeathed him on his 18th birthday, in 2012 came Largillier, from Jérôme Coessens’s monopole vineyard in the Aube, of 45-year-old pinot noir vines over chablisesque Kimmeridgian chalk. An electric, mineralesque wine with a huge personality, barrel-aged three years on its lees, redolent of ripe peach, walnuts, pears, Mirabelle plum and marzipan. “I describe Largillier as l’autre même, meaning, ‘the same but different’ –you see the family resemblance, but it’s not a Selosse estate wine.” Nor is Guillaume his father, but the likeness is uncanny.