Wine & Spirits - October 2012 - (Page 20)

books This fall, Julia Harding, Jancis Robinson and José Vouillamoz will publish Wine Grapes, an encyclopedia including every vine known to be producing a commercial wine. I recently caught up with Robinson and Harding in London to talk about the book. Robinson, who was giving a talk at the London International Wine Fair, told me that DNA research had narrowed the list, as some varieties were found to be synonyms of others. Harding, who did most of the research for the book along with Vouillamoz, sat down with me for dinner at The 10 Cases to talk about what she’d learned. She pointed out two countertrends to the narrowing list, with breeders developing new varieties and growers finding ancient ones. Harding is a Cambridge graduate who worked as a book editor prior to joining Robinson as her first full-time employee in 2005 (Robinson describes Harding’s first gig with her and the Oxford University Press in 2001 as “squishing” the Oxford Companion to Wine into the Concise Wine Companion, a project that launched her brilliant career). I asked Harding how this latest project came to be and how the team went about researching it. —Joshua Greene José emailed both of us in 2008 and asked if we would be interested in working with him on a book about the major grape varieties—a limited selection. Prior to that, Jancis and I had talked on various occasions. She said there is so much demand for an update of Vines, Grapes, Wines. We registered a domaine name but never did anything more than that. When José emailed, it fit nicely into what we’d been thinking. He’s Swiss, he’d worked at UC Davis with Carol Meredith, and he was coming to London. We met at the end of 2008 and said yes, let’s go for it. But instead of a few major grape varieties, we decided to do every variety. I think it was a bit of a surprise to him. I could envisage writing it between 2010 and 2011—a year’s process. In actual fact, it took us four to five months to work out which varieties we would include. José has a day job, working with medicinal plants. I wasn’t working on it full time, either. So the entire project took us a good two years. We started from the VIVC (the Vitis International Variety Catalog); it’s supposed to be the biggest database of grape varieties, maybe 2,000. We created a spreadsheet of all the varieties, went through the whole thing and tried to find out which were in production. Ended up with 1,367, but the number could change slightly. I haven’t counted the newly revised proofs. The number kept changing as we went along. We’d find one variety was the 20 W I N E & S P I R I T S O C T O B E R 2 0 1 2 An interview with Julia Harding, MW ten or more malvasias. Some have been distinguished by DNA profiling. Others not. Some people will be shocked when they come to a heading for gewurztraminer and it says, See savagnin blanc. Savagnin is the root of a lot of varieties. [Gewurztraminer] is an aromatic mutation of savagnin. Then you get traminer, which is non-aromatic, same as sav- same as another, or some that we didn’t think were in production but they were. Our criterion for including a variety was that somebody, somewhere, was making a wine from it, bottling it and selling it. Even if it were one person…and, in some cases, it is. Like eyholzer roter…I just bought some of this red ice wine. Joseph-Marie Chanton makes “Our criterion for including a variety was that somebody, somewhere, was making a wine from it, bottling it and selling it.” a lot of indigenous varieties at Kellerei Chanton in Visp, in the Valais. He has some very old vines and the wine is unbelievable. It’s oversimplifying to say it tastes of red cherries, but it does. I bought two bottles, sixty euros each. We’ve not shied away from hybrids. We’ve got some nice foxy wines in there, because people are making them and people are drinking them. While we were still working on the proofs, we came across Ives, an American variety. We found several people growing it. You can be very purist and say we’ll only cover vinifera, but people are drinking wines made from labrusca or hybrids, so why shouldn’t we include those as well? There were some areas that were fiendishly difficult, like malvasia. There are agnin. You get roter traminer, a pink mutation of savagnin. The index makes it clear which are synonyms. One of the things that’s revolutionary about the book: We talk about pinot as one variety— pinot gris, pinot blanc and pinot noir are all one variety. In the pinot diagram, I think there are 156 varieties in that particular pedigree and they are all natural crosses. They just happened in the vineyard. José doesn’t think one variety is prone to mutation more than another. The ones that show more mutations are just older. Any variety can mutate any time the DNA is replicated, during plant growth or propagation by cuttings. Only rarely do these mutations have any apparent effect. We try to explain how a new variety is born. And we try to say what a wine from the variety will taste like; it’s a book for wine drinkers, not just for nerds. Not that we don’t love nerds. We are nerds. I photo: image-release

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - October 2012

Wine & Spirits - October 2012
Editor’s Note
Happenings
Contents
Fined & Filtered: Jordan Mackay on Microlists
Skin Deep
Books: Josh Greene interviews Julia Harding, MW, about Wine Grapes
Spirits: Wild new whiskies, by Lou Bustamante
Best New Sommeliers 2012
Structured California Chardonnay
Nuits Blanches
Bourbon & Country Ham
New & Notable Bay Area Restaurants
Extreme Values: Great Buys for $10 or Less
Overview
American Chardonnay
Red Burgundy
Australian Shiraz
Bierzo & Galician Reds
American
Imported
Levi Dalton on Chinato

Wine & Spirits - October 2012