After 28 years of heading up winemaking at Dom Perignon, chef de cave Richard Geoffroy decided to focus his not inconsiderable expertise on making sake. It would be an understatement to say that this was hardly an obvious career move.
It’s easy to understand why he might want to exchange the high-pressured existence of driving style and quality at what is undoubtedly the world’s largest luxury wine brand for something a little less stressful. It’s just as easy to understand why he might want to exit the field of champagne entirely. Where else would you go after nearly three decades in the cellars of Dom?
The people who make great champagne are required to have a special kind of long-distance vision. They assemble the most embryonic raw materials — recently fermented still wines, unformed, barely palatable — and commit them to an ageing process over which they have virtually no further control. From the moment the yeast and sugar are added to the base wine and the second fermentation begins everything except a tiny percentage (just more than 1%) of the liqueur d’expedition is left to an evolution they can track but not direct.
Champagne ages for a long time. Properly stored fine examples from great vintages can give real drinking pleasure after 50 or 60 years. That’s a considerable test of patience as you wait to see your masterpiece edge towards perfection (or something close to it) and an eternity if you didn’t get it right. Perhaps that’s why Geoffroy has decided to focus on sake: it’s equally nuanced and it gets to wherever it was supposed to be much sooner.
When the captain of a cruise ship retires he doesn’t necessarily spend the rest of his life on land, even if his weekends aren’t dedicated to sailing a Hobie Cat. Finding a place between these two extremes is a matter of temperament: do you want to reconnect with the water and, if so, just how close to the water are you ready to go?
This month saw the release of the 2017 vintage of Glenelly’s Bordeaux-style blend, called simply Lady May. The estate, previously a fruit farm in Stellenbosch’s Ida’s Valley, was conceived and created by May-Eliane de Lencquesaing, formerly owner of Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande, one of the great properties of the Medoc. She undertook the project 20 years ago, at the age of 78. She was in SA this month, a few weeks shy of her 98th birthday, to celebrate the latest release of the estate’s flagship wine.
Unsurprisingly the Lady May 2017 is classically styled and certainly too youthful to be expressing its full potential. This was made abundantly clear when the 2011 vintage was served alongside it. Only in the Past year or so has the 2011 shifted up a gear. It now has supple and quite nuanced textures to complement its increasingly complex bouquet. (Incidentally, the 2013 Estate Chardonnay presented at the same event was only just entering the plateau of maturity.)
Wine is not only an object in time, but also a product of time. In re-engineering his career from champagne to sake Geoffroy has truncated the timeline of the beverage he produces. He will see sooner its full trajectory, from conception to the end of its useful life.
De Lencquesaing grew up sampling the great pichons of the 19th century. She could not have expected to see the fulfilment of her vision to create a great Bordeaux-style red in the Cape. However, this wasn’t a good reason not to attempt the project. There was no certainty she would see what the 2011 has become. She cannot seriously expect to follow the 2017 to its destination.
Over and above the technology and the chemistry, wine is also about vision. To make wine is to invest in the future, to believe in the alchemy of the fruit and to commit to an act of creation which transcends the time allotted to a single human lifespan.
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