We had an impromptu visit from Frank Cornelissen a week ago Saturday. You’ll know him as the strikingly original winemaker with vineyards on the slopes of Sicily’s Mt. Etna whose entry-level wine, Rosso del Contadino, is on our shelves. I got about 20 minutes to chat with him uninterrupted, and it was a treat. He’s thoughtful and a good listener; a fellow who actually answers the question you ask rather than the one he might prefer you’d asked. He clearly has no future in politics.
Cornelissen is known as a darling of the natural wine movement, although after my brief chat with him it wasn’t clear to me that his views are fairly represented by that group, or that he is entirely comfortable with being classified this way. When I used the word pragmatic to describe his approach he leapt at it. It’s not a term I normally associate with the natural wine movement which, from where I sit, is more accurately described as ideological.
It seems that the winemaker has evolved somewhat toward his current position. In recent interviews with Jaime Goode at the Wine Anorak site (they’re available in our wine library at kippt.com/stephenmeuse ) Cornelissen suggests that his thinking has changed over time – as well it might in any thoughtful person. For example, he now seems open to the targeted, minimal use of sulphur “in certain circumstances” — a shift that marks a clear dividing line between a dogmatic approach to winemaking and a practical one.*
My sense is that the wiry Belgian’s aim isn’t (or isn’t any longer) just to make a thoroughly ‘natural wine’ – but to make a wine that is as free from non-vineyard influences as is consistent with its health and well-being. Such a wine, he believes, can be a faithful expression of the physical conditions prevailing in a given vineyard in a given vintage – what he calls a “territorial wine.”
It’s an approach that differs from natural winemaking, per se, in an important respect: namely the way it sees means and ends. It’s my impression that for many natural winemakers, and those who (often unreflectively) revere them, the making of a natural wine is an end in itself, rather than a means to some greater end (quality? complexity? drinkability?). While, for Cornelissen, a naturalist approach is clearly means – the end being the production of territorial wines.
We talk as if setting a vineyard free to express itself in wine is a simple matter – but it’s far from it. One very stubborn problem, it seems to me, is how to know this authentic voice when we hear it, especially if there are competing voices to choose from.
I’m afraid we have to admit that there is no way to arrive at certitude on this question for the simple reason that there is no way to interrogate or ‘get at’ the terroir of a given site except by way of the wine we make from it. Yet, prune we must. Viewed in this way, terroir seems to consist in little more than the sum of the routine decisions that necessarily accompany winemaking.
I don’t know what Frank thinks about this, though I intend to ask him via email at some point. What I like is that I do not hear him claim that he is ever actually in touch with terroir. He’ll only say that he chooses to avoid introducing influences that divert the wine from being anything more or less than the fermented juice of healthy grapes from a specific fortuitously-situated and well-tended vineyard. In his mind, the best way to display terroir is to avoid introducing substances or practices that are likely to deform it. I appreciate the modesty of the position.
The idea that grapes need to be healthy and that the resulting wine needs to be sound are important. Nature rarely gives perfect grapes on its own, but a skilled craftsman can cultivate them and midwife the subsequent fermentations so that the results represent an improvement on what nature, left to itself, would reliably accomplish. This is where Cornelissen’s emphasis on pragmatism becomes important, I think. Is there any reason to think a faulty, unsound wine can be a capable communicator of terroir?
I’ll be in Sicily in May and hope to visit Frank while I’m there, at which time I expect to have more to report.
Thanks for patience with this extended weekly note.
*Maureen noted that while previous editions of Cornelissen’s Rosso del Contadino had been all over the map in terms of their perceptual characteristics – in some cases variation evident within a single bottle – more recent editions seemed to her to have been more stable in this respect.