Jancis Robinson on wines made from rare grape varieties

Robert Slotover is a classical music agent. But his virtuoso artists may occasionally find him rather elusive on their travels together all over Europe. Rather than checking out auditorium acoustics, he is likely to be skulking around independent wine shops trying to add to his collection of obscure grape varieties, the more obscure the better. He is obsessive in this respect, and it could be said that the world is catching up with him.

For years the French were dismissive about grape varieties (cépages in French). A vin de cépage was viewed as distinctly inferior, one that couldn’t muster a geographical appellation to put on the label. Slotover remembers asking someone in the wine department of Galeries Lafayette in Paris whether they had any wines made from rare grape varieties. The salesman responded loftily: “Ceci n’est pas un critère, Monsieur.” (“This is not a criterion, sir.”)

In the 1990s wine consumers and producers were fixated on a small handful of well-known international grape varieties, a limited range dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. But since then, producers have been looking far beyond trying to make copies of red bordeaux and white burgundy. The locavore movement and renewed interest in heritage varieties of other fruits have encouraged many to re-evaluate grape varieties that have a long history in their region and even to recuperate some that are almost extinct.

Wine producers such as the eco-conscious Familia Torres of Catalonia and the Plaimont group of co-operatives in Gascony have been active in this respect, but all over Italy especially there are individuals who are busy bringing long-ignored grapes back into production.

The development of DNA profiling was a game-changer for varietal identification. Previously different varieties could be identified by only a few individuals with the experience to know which sort of leaf and bunch belonged to which variety. But now geneticists have been able to build massive family trees of different varieties, and to work out how mystery vines relate to known varieties.

In 2012, with my fellow Master of Wine Julia Harding and the grape geneticist José Vouillamoz, I wrote a book, Wine Grapes, designed to be a compendium of every single grape variety we could find that was then making a wine in commercial production. We found 1,368 but I’m sure we would find at least 1,500 today. More prey for Slotover.

Recently he found a crowd more enthusiastic than the Galeries Lafayette salesman when he was invited by his friend, the design critic Stephen Bayley, to put on a tasting of 57 of his latest finds at the London club The Athenaeum. Bayley is a member of its wine committee and is keen to broaden members’ horizons. (Membership of London clubs’ wine committees are keenly fought over.) A total of 85 members and their guests had signed up for the tasting followed by a dinner with more conventional wines: white burgundy and red bordeaux.

The club’s vast drawing room was reconfigured to allow space for two very long tables covered with white cloths and more spittoons than I have ever seen at a wine tasting together with the 57 bottles described by Slotover in an accompanying booklet. I was awarded the privilege of arriving at 3pm so that I could taste them all in peace, accompanied only by the loud tick of a grandfather clock. I left just as everyone else was arriving and couldn’t help wondering which bottles would be drained first. Not, I hope, that of the Orpicchio made by Donne Fittipaldi on the Tuscan coast. It was, most unfortunately and through no fault of theirs, seriously affected by cork taint.

Having already tasted a couple of more modest selections by Slotover several years ago, I wondered in advance whether it would turn out to be a bit of a chore. (Though when I sent the list of wines to my Wine Grapes co-authors, Vouillamoz was deeply envious.) In the event I found this group of finds most impressive. Perhaps this is because today these rarities are being cherished by increasingly serious wine producers as opposed to being simply local oddities. The quality of the wines, particularly the whites, which don’t always last as long as reds, was also impressive in view of the fact that Slotover had bought some of them as long as four years ago.

I noticed that quite a few of the wines were certified organic and found that a higher-than-average proportion of the whites had been made as though they were reds, leaving the grapes in contact with the skins before and/or during fermentation. Perhaps the thought was that this increasingly popular technique would imbue the wines with even more varietal character, but I found that some of these wines, often called orange wines, were dominated more by the chewiness associated with extended skin contact than by the actual flavour of the grape variety.

The tasting got off to a grand start with a white wine made from a grape I had never heard of, Bouysselet, from the environs of Toulouse. At five years old, it was still very much alive and kicking. It ended with a less impressive red wine made from a Piedmontese grape called Slarina that tasted of dusty damsons and inky strawberry jam. Not perfect, but only 11.5 per cent alcohol. In fact most of these wines were less alcoholic than the norm, with only five of the 57 more than 15 per cent and some as low as 10.5 per cent.

Italy supplied the greatest number of selections — 15 in all — with 11 Spanish and eight each from France and Greece. I have long enthused about Greece and Portugal as valuable sources of fine wines made from indigenous grape varieties but only one example in this particular collection was Portuguese.

Switzerland, Austria, Romania, Serbia and Chile also fielded one wine apiece (the minor Bordeaux variety Gros Verdot, called Grosse Merille by its rescuer, in the case of Chile), with two from Croatia, three from Hungary and four from Germany — all from a Rheinhessen nursery specialising in ancient grape varieties. (It occurred to me that the geographical spread of the collection may be heavily influenced by Slotover’s concert calendar.)

He had grouped the grape varieties into two — one where he could find only a single producer and one where he found more. Within these two groups, whites were presented before reds and the grapes presented alphabetically. Afterwards I checked which of them we had included in our 2012 book. We did have 24 of the 31 multi-producer grapes but only six of the 26 grapes represented in the first single-producer group were featured in Wine Grapes. Time for a second edition?

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. More stockists from Wine-searcher.com

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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