Paul Wasserman & Fred Mugnier
THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED IN JUNE 2011 BETWEEN PAUL WASSERMAN AND FRÉDÉRIC MUGNIER. APART FROM THE TRANSLATION, IT’S PRETTY MUCH BRUT DE CUVE.
Fred: You want the recipes?
Paul: Please. Start with the white.
Fred: For a few years now I’ve used a starter. Ten days before the harvest I cut a few grapes and ferment them. It enables the fermentation to start without too much delay. That way I don’t need to use commercial yeast. In 2006, I experimented. I compared ambient with commercial yeast. And the ambient yeast fermented best. We did the same experiment for the malolactic fermentation, and once again, what wasn’t inoculated fermented best. 2006 was the end of my experimental period: I decided we would do without the help of the little powders.
I don’t stir the lees. The Clos de la Maréchale produces grapes that ripen well, that produce a lot of sugar, but keep good acidity. There is plenty of richness, of matière.
Pressing. Rapid settling. We inoculate with our starter. We have slow fermentations. The 2010s finished in spring. The first few years it freaked me out.
Paul: Did you have something in mind, a reference?
Fred: Yes. I like wines with tension and energy. I had a nearby reference, the Clos de l’Arlot Blanc. I talked with Jean-Pierre [Desmet]. And there’s Jean Marc Roulot, for example.
Paul: New wood?
Fred: I started with Jean-Marc’s recommendations but I lower the proportion every year. For the reds too. But I still have a little more new oak on the whites than on the reds.
Paul: How much?
Fred: 25% or thereabouts. Where there has been a true evolution, starting with 2008, is that I now rack into tank after a year. So one year in wood and about six months in stainless. And I find that to be noticeable progress. Fermentations are too long to bottle the wines before the following harvest. They need a longer élevage than that. But finishing the élevage in tank is much better. I have small tanks for that, I call them berlingots.
Paul: How much Maréchale blanc do you make?
Fred: 10 barrels.
Paul: Reds?
Fred: De-stemming. Always 100%. Except for experimental purposes.
Paul: How did it go?
Fred: Some interesting results but for the moment I have chosen not to integrate stems. I’d like to do some whole cluster. But there are often reasons not to. Either sanitary reasons – we often have a harvest that is far from perfect from a sanitary standpoint… 2007, 2008 – or for reasons of phenolic ripeness. That’s 2009. So for now I have stuck to full de-stemming.
I have tanks that allow me to control temperatures without manipulating the musts. So I make use of that. If grapes come in too warm I cool them down. But it’s not like I have the technical means to cool them down to very low temperatures. We’re not talking about blocking fermentations either. They start after 3 to 5 days, depending on the tank. I have both stainless and wood tanks and they start the same. In general fermentation takes 3 weeks.
Paul: Do you use stainless or wood for specific appellations?
Fred: No. At the end of the day, for me, it makes no difference. Fermentation behaves differently. But on the final result I see no difference.
One of the things that has become clear for me, is that it is very important to preserve the integrity of the berries, of the skins. Great care must be taken during transport, with every manipulation and with all the machinery and equipment. Everything must be done slowly and softly to obtain berries with skin that is not bruised or damaged.
Paul: Why is this important?
Fred: Every time skins are torn they releases green tannins, herbal flavors, coarse stuff. The other advantage is that with whole berries you get slower fermentations because the juice is extracted from the berries slowly. And to push the logic to its end you have to avoid early punch-downs. There is no point in putting whole berries in the tanks if you follow that with a pneumatic punch-down machine and you start crushing everything.
Paul: So early punch-downs are something you used to do?
Fred: Yes, in my beginnings, more than twenty years ago, I punched down vigorously. [Inaudible] … Now I punch down at the end of fermentation.
Paul: Frequently?
Fred: As a general rule less and less. From year to year, less and less.
Paul: Pump-overs?
Fred: On the stainless tanks because they are taller. The cap is higher and it has a tendency to dry out more.
Pressing… So some vintages we taste the press juice and it is evident that everything is good so we don’t nit pick. In other vintages part of the juice doesn’t taste right so we separate it out. But almost always, after six months, it turns out well and we blend it in.
We’re at 17 to 20% new wood these days, meaning that it no longer has a determining influence. Like everyone else, at one point we spent a lot of time talking about the advantages of one wood origin over another, of one kind of toast over another. And it does remain interesting to do so since even if we don’t have lot of new barrels they might as well be good ones. But at the end of the day, with the proportion [of new wood] we have today, it is not a determining factor.
Paul: Fining, filtration?
Fred: On the reds there is none. Zero.
Paul: On the whites?
Fred: It has varied. We’ve had all possible combinations since we’ve begun. But on the whites fining and filtering can be useful.
“Since I could never make up my mind, I decided I would vinify all the wines the same. Then that became a philosophy.”
Paul: So that’s the overall method. Are there vineyards you treat differently?
Fred: No. In the beginning I was tempted to adapt my winemaking to each cuvée. But what is absurd is that the temptation can run in a direction as well as its opposite. One could be tempted to say that Bonnes Mares should be a virile wine, therefore one should extract it more. Or, one could have the inverse logic, equally valid, and say that Bonnes Mares is a wine that is naturally, spontaneously, structured and tannic, so there is no need, no reason to force it, and one should instead opt for a softer extraction. But since I could never make up my mind, I decided I would vinify all the wines the same. Then that became a philosophy. If one privileges the expression of terroir, one shouldn’t force a wine to go in a direction it doesn’t want to spontaneously go in. So I vinify all of them in a rigorously identical manner. From start to end, from the moment they are in barrel until bottling, through the use of wood, etc. On a terroir level, this [philosophy] came to me rather quickly. What took a little longer, was the same philosophy but applied to vintages. In other words, I vinify in the same manner every year, for every vintage. I no longer seek to adapt my winemaking to the vintage. What won me over was the 2003 vintage. One had every reason to try and reinvent, to look for something completely novel. We had grapes like we’d never had before, conditions like we’d never had before. But, in retrospect, the right way to proceed was the habitual way.
“You cannot reconstruct balance. You cannot, through winemaking techniques, achieve balance in what was not balanced beforehand, however, you run every risk of destroying harmony.”
Paul: And that’s what you did in 2003?
Fred: For the most part that is what I did. One was tempted to shorten the fermentation. It was a bad idea. One was tempted to acidify. It was a bad idea. One was tempted to minimize punch-downs, to extract extremely lightly. It wasn’t necessarily a good idea either. No, for the most part, you had to make the 2003s like the other vintages. At the end of the day, as there exists an expression of terroir, there exists an expression of vintage. But for each terroir and for each vintage one respects a harmony. And there we leave the realm of rationality. You shouldn’t think that I strictly have an engineer’s approach. At the end of the day, I have come to the conclusion that nature has its own harmony. And all the work we do after it, the more we do, the more we risk destroying this harmony. You cannot reconstruct balance. You cannot, through winemaking techniques, achieve balance in what was not balanced beforehand, however, you run every risk of destroying harmony.
Paul: So you have faith in nature?
Fred: Yes. A concrete example: acidification has always struck a nerve in me. One can add tartaric acid, which is in fact extracted from grapes, then purified and powdered. In other words it is tartaric acid from grapes, that one adds to grapes, that already have the same thing. So, chemically speaking, there is no reason for the addition to change anything at all. The added tartaric acid is exactly of the same nature as what is already there, and it is added in small quantities. Yet I don’t think it tastes the same. I feel that acidified wines always have a metallic taste. Something that sticks to the front of the incisors, and that is unpleasant. But chemically, it makes no sense. How do I interpret it? Well, I believe that when the vine manufactures tartaric acid, it doesn’t just manufacture tartaric acid, but a whole group of compounds around the acid that we have no knowledge of. And when one purifies the tartaric acid to add it back to wine in the form of powder, one is adding the pure product, not the whole product, the assemblage. And when I speak of the harmony of nature, there is something of that order in it, which is not magical or esoteric. It simply cannot be explained with the knowledge we have today, but one day we will be able to. I believe that our foundation, the foundation of all living things is chemical, but it is a chemistry that is not yet fully understood. Voilà. One has to admit our own ignorance, and in ignorance one has to recognize that la nature est bien faite (nature does things well).
Paul: OK, those were my questions.
Fred: (Laughing) And what are you going to do with all of this? Wine is in the realm of the subjective. The only things of interest are what is experienced, what is felt. When I say that all living things are of a chemical nature, yes, but wine is not a chemistry experience, it is an esthetic one.
Paul: Or emotional, or affective.
Fred: Yes. But it is felt. The only interesting reality of wine is not its chemical nature. Its chemical nature has no interest. Wine is only subjective. What is aggravating is that reviewers try so hard to be objective. But that’s nonsensical.
Paul: I have my own ideas about that. Anyway. I don’t think it is subjective. Because you are confronted to two palates; not four, not five, not ten. There are always two groups. So there is something that is not subjective about it. If it were, you’d have all the colors of the rainbow.
Fred: You mean that among wine amateurs there are only two styles of wine they like?
Paul: As a larger tendency, yes. I have done these tastings and dinners in the US now for fifteen or sixteen years. The same people always like one style of wine, and the same people always like another style of wine. It rarely changes. So I don’t think it is subjective. I even think that there is an objectivity that is very simple. It is the moment when people decide when wine is good. There are those who decide when wine is still in the mouth and those who decide once wine has left the mouth. And that sorts people preliminarily into two camps. After that, then it becomes subjective. And, yes, there are also tasters who are inconsistent.
Fred: And I believe that one underestimates differences in perception. We don’t all have the same tasting apparatus. I don’t know if you know the neurophysiologist that studied this. He said something I found fascinating. He said that with eyesight, everyone sees the same thing, except for four genes that can cause one to see differently. One of the four is color blindness. But with taste, there are 367 genes, or thereabouts. And he puts this in evidence with tastings of simple elements, of pure flavors, to determine the threshold of perception of a given flavor. So in a population X, with a flavor that everyone perceives, you will see a curve in the shape of a bell. In the middle they will perceive at a level of 15, and there are people who are more sensitive and they will perceive at a level of 10, etc. But there are a bunch of flavors where the curve has the shape of a hat. Meaning that half the population will perceive a flavor at a level of 10 and the other half at a level of 50 and nearly no one at a level of 30. It ineluctably proves that some people have that flavor receptor and some so not. Or that some people have a flavor receptor model A and the others a model B. They are genetically different. Some people for example do not have the TCA receptor (…).
Paul: I am super sensitive to cork. But not really to aromas in general. I do it all with texture.
Fred: So do I.
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