Apart from the months spent travelling, countless days and evenings spent wine tasting and the outrageous wine expenditure in the name of ‘research’, sourcing quality wine requires a great deal of expertise and plenty of experience. You also need an unfailing confidence in your own palate; how else could you make judgments on the quality and appeal of a wine still in barrel, served to you in a small glass, in a freezing cold cellar, often on the other side of the world? Good contacts help too, as you're competing with a seemingly infinite band of wine traders the world over, all fighting for a highly finite amount of top quality wine. And you need to be obsessive. We toss and turn in our beds dreaming of regions and producers yet unexplored or undiscovered. We debate endlessly the merits of each potential wine purchase, of each new producer discovered.
Understanding the potential of a producer and their wines is not as easy as a slurp and a spit. Although there are many factors that we consider when deciding which wines to purchase, two stand out above all others. It goes without saying that first and foremost, the wines must be superb quality for their level. If a wine is not delicious, or will not become delicious with age, what’s the point? Wine is after all about pleasure! The second key factor that we consider is the integrity or authenticity of the wine; that is to say, how hard the producer works in their vineyards to ensure that their wines intensely reflect the personality of the vineyards in which they are grown. Why is this important to us? Because we firmly believe that a talented wine grower who works hard in their vineyards will make higher quality, more authentic, more expressive, more interesting wines - all other things being equal - than one who does not. To this end, a visit to the vineyards will tell us as much about a given producer as the wines themselves.
Great wine is the product of great fruit so wine growers who a: are willing to work the hardest in order to produce the finest possible grapes, and b: know how to ‘manage’ the winemaking process in order to preserve the inherent quality and personality of their grapes, will produce the finest wines. An understanding of this reality, and what to look for in a vineyard to assess how it is being managed, is therefore vital to assessing what a producer is capable of. So, when we are presented with a wine that seems to deliver all the interest and pleasure we search for, a visit to the vineyards will then give us the greatest clue of how such wines and their producers will perform over the long term.
The best growers, in France at least, will have eradicated herbicides and pesticides (at a minimum), if not all chemicals. They will plough, and will very commonly utilise organic or biodynamic practices. They will favour old vines, low yields, and will make a strict fruit selection at harvest time, especially critical in colder, marginal climates. In Australia and other countries, where the conditions may be milder and the soils very different, the best producers will at least be engaging with some of these practices. Regardless of the country of origin, the world’s finest producers will certainly express the strong belief that wine is grown, not made, and will therefore believe that the work they do in the vineyards will determine the ultimate quality of the wines they produce.
This is why the work in the vineyard is so important to us. It will be the viticultural and, to a lesser extent, the winemaking practices, that will ultimately determine what we find in the glass. This is especially the case if we are considering the long term, i.e., the experience of drinking many bottles of this producer’s wine, both young and old. Many, many wine lovers, including a number of critics, make the mistake of believing that a taste of a wine, at one moment in time, without any context, is all they need to ascertain quality. This is a fallacy. A necessary fallacy perhaps (critics have a job to do after all) but a fallacy none the less. You need to drink many bottles of a given wine, over many years, to truly understand what a wine is about. Doing this with multiple vintages, all the while pondering the context of the terroir (vineyard, region, vintage) from which the wine has derived, as well as the viticultural and winemaking practices that were used to produce the wine, is the only genuine way to truly comprehend a producer, their vineyards and the wines they produce. In the absence of such experience and such context it is very hard to assess a wine in any meaningful sense (sorry blind tasters!). That is not to say you cannot enjoy or appreciate a wine without this depth of knowledge; the point is that there is a radical difference between a snap judgement and true knowledge. While it is often not possible to have this experience or context when assessing a wine, it is worthwhile (and humbling) to keep the above in mind.
The discussion of vineyard practice leads us to a key point that is often missed about producers who follow biodynamic or organic viticulture. It seems that many people who hear wine vendors use these terms believe that such techniques and their promotion have as much to do with marketing as anything else. While we understand this cynicism (we share it with the term 'natural wine') we believe it misses a fundamental point. If a vigneron follows organic or biodynamic viticulture, it is evidence that they are willing to work harder in the vines to produce higher quality, more terroir rich wines. This is clearly a good sign. To be clear: it is simply more work to manage a vineyard without chemicals and you must be ‘closer’, more present, in the vines. This is itself is not a guarantee of quality – you still have to be talented, knowing how to manage your vines, when to pick, and how to manage the winemaking in order to protect the quality inherent in the fruit and in order to produce precise, pure wines (which we also look for). Not everyone has these skills and some people are simply more gifted than others. And of course some vineyards, some terroirs are simply better than others. On the other hand, spending more time in the vineyard and showing a willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve balanced, healthy fruit is a very good sign. If the wines are also wonderful, well, they are likely to be equally so in the future.
The fact is that today basically all of the great French vignerons work to totally exclude, or at least minimise any chemical usage. Why? Because, chemicals, especially herbicides and pesticides, destroy much of the life in the soil, and because these vignerons have realised, often through careful trials, that a ‘living soil’ viticulture, harder though it is to manage, produces higher quality fruit, fruit that is more saturated with the personality of its vineyards. This is why so many great French producers work organically or biodynamically; not for marketing purposes, nor for any ideological reasons, but because it has produced tangibly better results for them. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And for the skeptics out there, many of the results of biodynamic and organic practice, such as microbiologically active soils, healthier vines and the quality of the wines themselves, are testable (and tested!) It also seems clear that wines grown with less chemical inputs express their ‘sense of place’ much more clearly and are therefore, to our mind, more authentic and more interesting (why would we import a French wine that tasted like a Californian or Australian wine?)
Let us give a concrete example. There are a number of conventional Champagne producers who make highly regarded wine within the context of their genre (whether you like the style or not or think it is worth the money is another question). But these wines are made in the winery. The base wines are relatively neutral and come from 'conventionally' farmed vineyards where herbicides, pesticides and high yields are the norm. It is the winemaking: barrel fermentation, controlled oxidation, blending of disparate wine styles, dosage characters, etc, that delivers almost all of the wine’s personality. A visit to the vineyards of any of the most famous Champagne houses make it clear that these wines are not ‘grown’ - they are made.
On the contrary, the finest grower producers in Champagne (and to be clear we are talking about a very small number of producers) utilise natural viticulture, living soils and lower yields to produce base wines that already have all the flavour and character they need. The winemaking practices that follow aim to allow this personality, this terroir, to ‘speak’. We make no apologies for the fact that we find such wines far more exciting and authentic than their 'traditional' counterparts. That is why we import them!
By the way, as everyone is talking about ‘natural wines’ let us just state that the only area of wine growing where ‘natural’ has any validity or importance is in the vineyards. Limiting the use of chemical inputs in order to be ‘natural’ is really about promoting a living soil and a balanced, self resistant vine. A living soil in turn will interact with the vine and produce more terroir intense fruit. It will produce a better wine. End of story. The idea that using no sulphur in the winery is more ‘natural’ is a nonsense that can be illuminated with one simple statement: those who claim not to use sulphur in the winery, use it, along with copper, in the vineyards. So how can it be so bad? Of course the use of sulphur should be minimised, but to eliminate its use at the expense of wine quality and longevity is a folly.
The great news on the wine sourcing front is that today, there is more quality wine being made in both Europe and on our own doorstep than ever before. Of course, today's global village brings with it global demand and so it is harder and harder to get decent allocations of the best wines. Everyone wants the stuff! All we can do is keep fighting for our share and use our years of experience to bring you the very best wines available.
It's not all about wine. People are what truly differentiate one business from another. At Bibendum, we have a remarkable community of people that work within the organisation. For a start, there are some 200 years of collective wine trade experience that has been accumulated by the Bibendum team. Our sales team are all, without fail, wine people first and foremost. They work with Bibendum because they love wine and we believe their passion, knowledge and enthusiasm is one of our greatest assets. In fact we are blessed with many passionate and extremely knowledgeable people across all areas of the business: customer service, administration, writing and publishing, design, technology and logistics. Our highly skilled team members enable us to strive for the highest possible standards across all these areas.
We not only aim to have the most dynamic and extensive range of high quality producers from across the globe. Our aim is also to offer more content that any other wine business and more powerful communication and technology tools that ultimately enable us to better service our customers’ needs. This web site is a good example of this – powerful ecommerce and content delivery technology that we intend to continue developing in the years to come.
We also uphold the highest possible standards in terms of our shipping and warehousing. Bibendum is one of the few wine companies that totally controls its own warehousing and where all picking and packing is done by our own experienced staff. This enables us to offer mixed case orders at no extra cost to our customers while maintaining a very low picking-error rate. Equally important, every bottle of wine we import is shipped via refrigerated containers and collected in refrigerated trucks in warmer weather. Every bottle of wine, regardless of origin, is stored in our warehouses in temperature controlled conditions. We are also very cautious about how we freight our wines locally, using refrigerated trucks where possible, and holding back deliveries of more sensitive wines when the weather is too hot. Our producers have worked their backsides off to make the best possible wines. We have a duty of care to protect these wines while they are in our hands. It is a duty we take very seriously.
Cheers!
The Team at Bibendum Wine Co
