Jean-Luc Terrier, like many other Saint-Véran producers, avoids the use of wood for his basic, estate Saint-Véran so that it can be enjoyed young. He ferments the wine in stainless-steel tanks and holds it there until he is ready to bottle it. The 1998 opens with very seductive fruit. The wines he produces from his old vines and his best vineyard sites, however, are fermented or aged at least partially in wood. Part of his 1998 wine from the Terres Noirs vineyard is fermented in steel tanks and part in barrels. It has an aroma of honey and flowers and the texture of silk. The wine he makes from Les Cras, which is sold out almost as soon as it’s released, is fermented and aged in wood alone.
“The wine can be relied on,” he said, “to have a good weight and feel. It simply doesn’t need the spurt of fruit that stainless steel preserves in our other wines.” When I tasted the 1997, it showed just the beginning of bottle bouquet, but the flavor was already deep and long.
Roger and Christine Saumaize of the Domaine Saumaize-Michelin are among those who use only wood for their wines. “Stainless-steel tanks allow a very close control of fermentation temperature,” Christine Saumaize told me. “And fermentation at a very low temperature retains primary grape aroma. But it does so at the expense of any expression of terroir and robs the wine of real personality. Fermentation in barrel presents obvious problems, and temperature control is only one of them. But if the lees are left in the barrel and stirred from time to time, the wine will have a fatter texture and a length and depth of flavor that become increasingly important with age. That primary aroma, so attractive in a young wine, soon fades, and often there’s nothing much to take its place.”
Some growers who ferment their wine in tanks also hold it there a few months on the fine lees. Apart from any other benefit, a wine stays fresher in the presence of its lees: They protect it by absorbing free oxygen. But the surface area of lees settled in the bottom of a 10,000-liter tank, relative to the volume of wine, is less effective than lees that have spread over the lower part of a 220-liter barrel. Most Saint-Véran growers try for the advantages of both steel and wood by combining a proportion of wine fermented in each.
Quite a number do achieve that kind of balance, though Christine Saumaize says she doesn’t find the result satisfactory. “When we bought our first barrels in 1985,” she told me, “we used them to make wines we could combine with the wine we had fermented in steel tank. But the cuvée lacked harmony. We tried again and again, and finally we came to the conclusion that we had to choose tanks or barrels, one or the other, and we chose wood.”
I soon learned that it wasn’t so much a matter of choosing wood or tank, but doing what the fruit dictated. “If you’re going to ferment a wine in wood,” Bénédicte Vincent of the Château de Fuissé explained, “it must have concentration to begin with. That means old vines, low yields, a privileged site, or all three. The wines we make from our vineyards in Saint-Véran, where the vines are young, are never in wood. (To satisfy our American customers, who like a barrel—fermented style, we buy grapes from a Saint-Véran grower with old vines to make a wine we bottle under our merchant label.) And, in turn, we know that a wine with substance from older vines needs to have time in wood if it is to reach its potential.”
Guy Saumaize of Domaine des Maillettes, like many another, makes what he calls a “traditional” Saint-Véran, fermented and held in stainless steel on lees routinely stirred until he bottles the wine in the March following the harvest. (“Even in tank,” he says, “the lees give a fatter texture.”) He also produces a Grande Réserve, from old vines and fermented and matured in wood alone, and when I tasted the wine I could almost feel its power and intensity.
“There’s a call for both kinds of wine,” Guy Saumaize said. “A wine fermented in stainless steel has a dashing immediacy. But it’s out of place with certain foods. A barrel-fermented wine is more complex, more nuanced, and eventually more satisfying. You must be willing to wait for it, however. And then take the time to appreciate it.”
And that’s part of the art of living.
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