How much should a wine reflect the personality and aims of the producer as opposed to the character of the vineyard? Winemaker Rodney Easthope suggests that simple answers and dichotomies are less than useful.

Purists of ‘terroir’ would suggest that any evidence of the producer’s personality and aims in a wine could only be detracting from the character of the vineyard. Often, however, the producer has selected the site, planted the vine, sculpted its growth and regulated its yield – and, in so doing, has exposed the character of the vineyard. This suggests that vineyard and producer are indissolubly linked.

Such a link is clearly evidenced, for example, in the best producers of Burgundy, the ones who most clearly and consistently expose the characters of individual vineyards – Domaine de la Romanée Conti being a prime instance. Paradoxically, it must surely be the aim and personality of the producer showing through this exposition of vineyard character.

A dichotomy between producer personality and vineyard character becomes more pronounced at the commercial end of the wine market. In this sector, non-intrinsic concepts such as ‘brand’ and ‘style’ are the key features of a wine’s makeup. Witness such successful domestic brands as Graça and Chateau Libertas, where the producer aims to blend away the differences in source vineyards, and even ameliorate the varied personalities of successive vintages. Of course the producers of Graça and Chateau Libertas understand that the consumer targeted by these wines has no desire to discover the particular soil or mesoclimate that conspired to imprint itself on the wine. What this consumer desires is a reproducible consistency.

Making such wines is more akin to industrial beverage manufacturing than to traditional artisanal winemaking. At the other end of the scale, the generally higher-priced wines (mostly from Old World producers) are characterised by concepts such as ‘individuality’, ‘uniqueness’ and ‘rarity’. These concepts, more often than not, we can trace back to the individual parcel of grapes from a particular envelope of vineyard.

The fact is that any producer in the world can produce ‘chardonnay’, but only a few can make Montrachet. But how does a producer, faced with a parcel of grapes from a vineyard as profound as Montrachet, then extract and preserve the vineyard’s unique site character while at the same time maintaining that producer’s aims and personality? The answer to this is intrinsically linked to another famous question around wine: that of varietalism versus terroir.

Indeed, as New World producers (first in California, then in Australia and everywhere else) began to label and market their wines under the banner of the grape variety rather than, as in the case of classical Europe under the name of the region from which the wine came, the emphasis in production was irrevocably changed. The incredible commercial success of varietal labelling led to producers promoting the character of the grape variety as the key element of a wine’s taste, at the expense of those secondary and subtler characters which are evocative of origin.

Moving from traditional oxidative practices, modern varietal winemakers learnt that reductive winemaking techniques (keeping the juice and wine from the influence of oxygen) would help to preserve the primary varietal character of the resulting wine. Such techniques used in Burgundy, say, on a parcel of Montrachet grapes, would produce an intensely fruity and powerful, yet simple wine; characteristics which are evocative of the site – such as minerality, finesse and complexity – would be largely absent. The modern varietal winemaker of the New World will further disrespect the fruit’s individual character by gross adulteration, making use of additives like acid and sugar, through more invasive styles of oak usage, and through fining and filtration.

Conversely, a producer more determined to bring out vineyard character in the wine will normally be less protective with regard to oxygen, and more circumspect with additives and ameliorants. Much depends on the vineyard itself, of course – when faced with grapes from high-yielding, over-irrigated vineyards, any attempt to expose the site through using less protective techniques will undoubtedly result in a dilute, unbalanced, and probably faulty wine.

A preliminary conclusion might well seem to be that the aims and personality of the producer will be (or should be) reflected in the wine in inversely proportion to the quality of the source vineyard. It would be, however,  premature to conclude this, in light of recent trends in fine wine production – in both Old and New Worlds.

Commercial success for a wine producer traditionally depended on relationships and reputations with the wine trade, and even more directly, with consumers. Success now often relies upon the opinions of powerful individual wine critics, such as the American Robert Parker, and wine-judging committees on shows and competitions. This has given rise to styles of wine – such as icon Australian shiraz – which all seem to be coated in dollops of new American oak, masking all but the barest nuance of site-reminiscent flavour. Or witness the wave of red wines from around the world that are highly extracted, highly alcoholic and also heavily oaked – to seduce show judges as well as Mr Parker and his 100 point scale.

In such instances, the aim of the producer is short-term commercial success, resulting in ‘the character of the vineyard’ being pushed to the bottom of the list of wine-making philosophical points. But is the producer to blame in these instances? Or is it the influential wine critics? Or is it the herd-like mentality of the wine trade and consumers?

When a hitherto unrecognised producer is faced with the question of what to do with a character-filled parcel of high quality grapes, many factors – not the least of them being financial pressure – have to be considered when determining how best to establish and build market sentiment and share. The temptation to use the wine-critic catapult would be regarded by wine purists and idealists as the least pure and virtuous option; the bank manager is, however, rarely a wine purist.

One could attempt to clearly define what proportion of producer influence and what proportion of vineyard character are to be found in a wine, but the attempt is thwarted by commercial realism and, more often, by the quality of the source material. Subjectivity also plays a role, resulting in a great variability in wine appraisal, and further bluring attempts at definitive views regarding the producer’s roles and obligations to making fine wine. Thankfully, this very subjectivity is one reason that wine is still so varied. It is the individual, via his or her role in exposing vineyard character, or in the appraisal of taste, that determines the balance between the producer and vineyard and their respective imprints on a wine.

That other great conundrum of wine rhetoric, the definition of terroir, is bound up with the issues discussed here. A vivid perspective to all of them is brought by the observation of Professor Warren Moran of Auckland University: ‘The soil exists, but the terroir arrives when somebody makes an expressive wine from grapes grown in it. Without people the wine and the word terroir would not exist.’