The 2024 vintage in Bordeaux brought record rainfall – but there’s much more to the year than this. As the first wines are released, Sophie Thorpe reports on a complicated year and the wines it produced

Explore the 2024 vintage in Bordeaux and the wines it produced – looking at the growing season and style of the wines as they’re released en primeur

Bordeaux 2024 wines en primeur – vintage overview

Bordeaux 2024: vintage overview  

When it comes to whisky, the conversation has long been dominated by maturation – on how long the liquid spends slumbering in which cask, on how big the cask is and what it held before, whether a Sherry butt, wine barrique, first-fill Bourbon barrel or the fashionable mizunara. Recently, there’s been an increased focus on the base product, with producers such as Waterford’s Mark Reynier championing single-site, single-barley, terroir-driven whiskies (and rums, with his Renegade project). But, somehow, there’s a tendency to skip on by the magic that happens in between: distillation.  While grain whisky is column distilled, malt whisky is almost exclusively distilled in copper pot stills – indeed, it’s a legal requisite for Scotch whisky. Crafting these copper beauties is an art – and one that depends on a handful of specialists. Kentucky has Vendome, Germany has Kothe and CARL, Italy has Frilli and Scotland has Forsyths. The equipment these coppersmiths produce lays the foundation the DNA of its new-make.  To the untrained eye, these onion-shaped pieces of kit look almost identical, but the size and shape is distinct to each distillery – defining its style. As distilleries expand and increase production, they don’t buy a bigger still – but commission exact replicas of their existing still(s), with every dent and dimple carefully recreated. Macallan, famously, replaced all its stills when building its new state-of-the-art distillery in 2018, asking Forsyths to create 36 stills that were identical to those it had previously used.  Although there have been attempts to use other metals, copper has long been favoured for distilling – originally for its pliability, making it easy to work and shape. But by the early 20th century, it was apparent that copper had other benefits – stripping the spirit of impurities. As the vapour rises through the still, it reacts with the copper, capturing sulphur, cyanides, carbonates and acids, meaning the liquid that is eventually collected is purer. Coppersmiths play on this purifying effect to create a range of stills, for the longer the vapour spends in contact with the copper, the lighter the spirit you’ll produce. Take Glenmorangie’s tall, 17-feet-high stills which produce a very light spirit, and compare them to the small, squat stills and typically heavy spirit of the Macallan. Of course it’s not quite as simple as that. As well as the ratio of copper to liquid, the speed of distillation, the shape of the still, the size of the neck, the level of reflux, the angle of the lyne arm and venting of stills all have an impact.  Rothes-based Forsyths has been hammering copper into shape for Scotland’s leading distillers for over 150 years. Richard Forsyth OBE (who has now passed management of the business to his son, Richard Jr) was the third generation of his family to run the coppersmiths. The frank, self-effacing Scot remembers working in his father’s workshop aged 15, “I knew this is what I wanted to do… I found it fascinating.” And after 55 years, his eye still twinkles when he talks about the arch of a still’s swan neck, the art of wielding a planishing hammer and the characters that make the industry so interesting.   He joined the family business in 1967 – at what happened to be a pivotal moment for the industry. During the Second World War, the whisky business ground to a halt – and with it the need for stills. In the 1950s and ’60s, however, the industry grew rapidly – too rapidly, it turned out. What was a golden era turned into a whisky lake, with many distilleries soon mothballed. Forsyths – for whom 99% of its business was servicing the whisky industry – had to find something else to pay the bills, and it was up to Richard to find that something else. They branched out first into paper, then stainless steel and – by the late 1990s – oil and gas. Although coppersmithing remained the foundation and heart of the business, these other disciplines became the main money-makers until the early 2010s, when whisky’s current boomtime set in. Today, Forsyths maintains over half of the pot stills in Scotland. For a wash still (distilleries that double-distil have wash and spirits stills, first distilling the wash into “low wines” and then distilling the “low wines” into new-make spirit), the head, neck and condenser wears out in eight to 10 years, while the pot itself may last 25. Add to that developing new stills for the thriving industry – as well as their expansion into rum, Bourbon and tequila – and the company’s not short of work.   Although there is clear resistance to change with an industry that is entrenched in tradition, things have shifted, slowly but surely, over the years. And there have been two significant changes over the last century that have transformed the Scotch whisky world: the firing of stills and the nature of condensers.  When shell-and-tube condensers were invented in the 1880s, as an alternative to old-fashioned worm tubs, it took time for producers to be persuaded. Although shell-and-tube condensers are significantly more efficient and take up much less space, they are completely different – with the copper surface area at least 20 times larger, something which has a key impact on the spirit. To this day some producers (15 to be exact – including Craigellachie, Mortlach, Glen Elgin and Springbank, the latter only for their wash still) retain their worm tubs, valuing the heavier, richer, more complex (and in some instances, even meaty, savoury) spirit character.   Traditionally stills were direct-fired – heated by flames fed by peat, coal or gas. “It’s dirty, messy, difficult to handle – and to control,” Forsyth tells me. A push for safety and efficiency saw producers switch to using steam in the 1970s. But some argue that this shift wasn’t for the better. Fire created a less consistent heat, with hot spots that would burn the wash and promote Maillard reactions (the same reaction that takes place when you brown meat, or during the bottle-ageing of Champagne or other traditional-method sparkling wine) – adding nutty, roasted notes that build complexity, or so proponents would argue. Glenfarclas is known for having briefly dallied with steam before returning to direct-firing, along with the likes of Macallan, Glenfiddich and Springbank.  As the whiskies of this pre-modernisation era – Scotch’s so-called “golden age” – become increasingly coveted, distilleries (both new and old) are looking to recreate these practices. Along with traditional floor maltings, producers like Glen Garioch (owned by Suntory) and Dunphail are investing in direct-firing. (Although, with worm tubs no longer produced, new distilleries have little choice regarding shell-and-tube condensers.)  However they are fired, given their custom nature, copper pot stills don’t come cheap. Much of the work continues to be done by hand, hammering to strengthen and finish the copper. Stills can range from 5,000 to 50,000 litres in capacity, but an average 15,000-litre still and its condenser will require between 1,800 and 2,000 manhours, and set you back around £250,000. And that price has only increased recently, thanks to rising energy and material costs – with a copper shortage proving challenging for Forsyths, a business that is the UK’s second-biggest buyer of the metal.  With the distinct nature of stills and their impact on spirit, plenty of new producers will ask for copies of a particular distillery’s stills – wishing to emanate their style of spirit. Forsyth tells me how one Japanese customer requested a pair each of Macallan, Glenlivet and Glenrothes stills. While of course there are many problems with this imitation game, there’s also no guarantee – as Forsyth tells me – that the same equipment will have the same results, especially when not run with the same wash, in the same way, by the same people. And, of course, a company like Forsyths isn’t going to give away Macallan’s proprietary designs, for example. As such, they’ll recreate something similar, but ensure it’s tweaked so no two distilleries have exactly the same design.   But how much impact do stills really have on the final spirit? Despite his half-century in the trade, Forsyth is quick to suggest, “I don’t think a lowly coppersmith can talk too much about that.” He’s clear that you need good equipment to make good spirit, but it’s one factor in amongst everything else – the barley, water and fermentation times, for example. And how a still is used is as important as its shape or size, with both the speed of distillation and the all-important cuts – dividing the heart from the foreshots and feints. Forsyth firmly believes that good wood is “the single biggest effect in a bottle eight, 10 or 12 years later”. There’s little use having a good base spirit if it’s ruined by a decade in bad oak – but good oak also can’t salvage bad spirit.  Forsyth has seen it all during his 55 years in the whisky business – and has been forced to be as malleable as the metal his family has worked for generations to survive the booms and busts. Despite the challenges, the coppersmith is as enchanted by his trade as when he first picked up a hammer in his father’s workshop. The industry will doubtless continue to ebb and flow, but with a spirit that takes decades to produce, the pace of change is reassuringly gentle. “It almost goes as slow as the running of the spirit,” Forsyth says whimsically. The still room remains the beating heart of distilleries – the basis of a producer’s fingerprint, all thanks to the careful hammering of the artful coppersmith.  Browse all current Scotch whisky listings or read more about spirits  

There’s something romantic about the bulbous sheen of a copper pot still. These behemoths glimmer with the promise of fine spirit – but it’s rare that we talk about what happens within. Sophie Thorpe sat down with Richard Forsyth OBE of Scotland’s leading coppersmiths, Forsyths, to find out more 

Cult coppersmiths Forsyths on the art of crafting copper pot stills for the biggest names in Scotch whisky – and how they define a distillery’s spirit style

How copper pot stills define whisky styles

Copper craft: the art of the still

Walking into the cooperage at Ch. Smith Haut Lafitte is like stepping back in time, filled with the smell of seasoned wood, an open fire and the same tools that barrel-makers have used for centuries. Few estates have the luxury of an in-house cooper. While producers inevitably work closely with the tonnelleries (barrel-making firms, such as François Frères, Stockinger and more), having an artisan on-site, working alongside the winemaking team to craft casks exclusively for your specific terroir is different. “It’s very important for the precision of the wine,” explains Cellar Master Yann Laudeho.  Florence and Daniel Cathiard, owners of the Pessac-Léognan estate, built a cooperage on-site almost 30 years ago, in 1995, and their current cooper, Yann Dez, has been working here since 2021. The Bordeaux native’s father was a metal worker, and Dez fell into the world of barrel-making entirely by accident – having a friend who was a tonnelier, and a job opening at an opportune moment. Before he knew it, Dez had learnt the trade from some of the best coopers in the country (including one who now makes the barrels at Ch. Margaux), and spending 15 years working under Didier Fesil. Fesil was the Cathiard family’s first cooper back in 1995, who went on to create his own small tonnellerie (Tonnellerie Bordelaise), and has been named the nation’s best “Master Cooper” – twice. Indeed, Fesil is still very involved with the estate, helping choose the wood for barrels and advising on all things oak; and it was Fesil who put Dez forward for the role at Smith Haut Lafitte.  “There are no books,” Dez says, when I ask about the art of barrel-making. “It’s passed on from tonnelier to tonnelier." The first evidence of coopering as a trade dates back to 900BC – with the craft passed down the generations ever since. “I continue the tradition,” Dez says, clearly with a sense of pride in this ancient, artisanal skill. But with the dust, noise and physical labour involved, tonnellerie schools, Dez tells me, are struggling to recruit young people. It’s common for coopers to have issues with their shoulders and ears (from the non-stop hammering) – and Dez himself has broken an elbow.  In theory, the process can be mechanised – but Dez is clear on how important it is to work by hand, and not just to preserve this ancient art. “I hear the nose, I feel the resistance,” he says. Each barrel, he explains, is different – with a slightly different number of staves and slightly different shape, all adapted according to the wood he’s working with. Selecting the right wood is key – “reading” it, he explains, looking at the grain to see where potential weaknesses are, understanding where will take the most pressure and placing each stave accordingly, ensuring not a drop can seep from the finished barrel. “It’s a job that is both physical, and at the same time requires thinking,” says Dez – and this combination is much of its allure for him.  Hearing the way Dez talks about barrels is fascinating; for him, they each have a unique personality. When I ask Dez how he knows he’s made a really good barrel, he shrugs: “On le sent.” (“You feel it.”) As you toast a barrel, he tells me, the scent of the smoke changes, releasing different aromas – something I smell as he works in front of me. Knowing when it’s spent the perfect amount of time over the fire is the secret – and it’s about more than just the smell, it’s a gut instinct that he can’t quite explain.  Smith Haut Lafitte sources oak from a range of forests, and are always trialling wood from different forests, toasts and doing blind tastings, although – after over 25 years – they know what works for their wine, and terroir. Cellar Master Laudeho explains that, for him, Tronçais and Jupilles are the best – “diamonds” that flawlessly complement their site. And that balance is key; the wood works for the wine, not the other way around.  It seems like a lonely job, I comment, hammering away in his tower – but it’s not something that bothers him. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist,” he tells me. Having only himself to depend on, and knowing that he can ensure each barrel meets his exacting standards, suits him. Indeed, he doesn’t even settle for standard tools – making most himself, custom-designed to suit the way he works. He talks me through a specific hammer that he made, and how it allows him to work better and more precisely, the wooden handle almost silken from the hours of use, shaped to his hand.   The lone electronic technology to have earned a place here are noise-cancelling headphones and a Marshall speaker. He’s a musician in his spare time, and an additional perk of working alone is that he gets to spend all day listening to music. “All the barrels I’ve made,” he says, “are made with music.” He avoids anything too modern or electronic, favouring old jazz, with some reggae, ska jazz and funk in the mix, depending on the day. While he doesn’t feel the music he listens to influences his coopering, he suspects his mood does – and music is a big part of that.  Woodwork is much more than a job for Dez. I spy a beautiful chest alongside his speaker, and it’s one that he made. He has a workshop at home too, spending his free time making everything from guitar stands and toys to chandeliers – anything, he says, that isn’t straight, and therefore can’t really be done by a machine.  It’s amazing watching him work – in the same way as coopers have for centuries – with a natural intuition, ease and precision. There’s definitely something musical to it, a craft that has its own rhythm. He makes around 300 barrels a year, and they may not be soloists – but each one contributes their own note to that year’s symphony.  Explore all current listings of Ch. Smith Haut Lafitte or read more about Bordeaux 

Wooden barrels line most of the finest wine cellars around the world – and many are made by hand. Continuing our series taking you behind the scenes in Bordeaux, we ducked into the cooperage at Smith Haut Lafitte to find out more about this special craft

We visited Pessac-Leognan’s Smith Haut Lafitte to talk to the wine estate’s master cooper, Yann Dez – and find out all about the art of barrel-making

Meeting Smith Haut Lafitte’s Master Cooper

Working to the beat: Smith Haut Lafitte’s Master Cooper

Screaming Eagle winemaker Nick Gislason wears many hats – he is also the Technical Director of Lopez Island Community Fireworks and co-founder of Hanabi Lager. FONDATA's Gavin Lucas caught up with the busy man to discuss how these dichotomous ventures have more in common than you might think.

Screaming Eagle's Nick Gislason on winemaking, beer brewing (Hanabi Lager) and designing fireworks (Island Community Fireworks)

FONDATA: Curiosity & Wonder: Magic’s Secret Ingredients 

Curiosity and wonder: magic’s secret ingredients

Go into any winery in the world, and it’s now unusual not to find a glass wine globe or clay amphora lurking in the corner. Oak has long been the traditional ageing vessel for wine – light, easily transportable, the grain fine enough to allow micro-oxygenation (aiding the polymerisation of tannins, making the wine more supple), and, especially when new, the ability to add toasty, spicy complexity. But with technology and global warming, many winemakers are looking beyond oak – and Jean-Marie Fourrier is one of them.  “We noticed the barrels generating the most problems were new oak,” says Fourrier. He and his team had been monitoring each barrel during élevage, and started noticing a trend. They observed that the volatile acidity was 0.2-0.3% higher in first-fill barrels. To compensate for the higher volatility, Fourrier had to add more sulphur to those barrels, something that he’d like to avoid – feeling that higher sulphur additions can mask the terroir.  But why were the new barrels the most volatile? With climate change, trees – Fourrier argues – are growing more quickly, meaning that their trunks don’t have the same density, and this is responsible for the increased volatility. He’s not alone in paying attention to the density of wood; it’s something that Clos de Sarpe has started monitoring, weighing each barrel and noting how this impacts the wine during élevage. Fourrier also feels that climate change has impacted cork, as he told me in 2021 – noting how cork is harvested every seven to eight years versus the 20 of yesteryear. The corks are less dense and this leads to higher oxygen transfer – it’s one reason that he chooses to wax his wines (instead of metal capsules), to help counter the quality of the cork itself, something that Olivier Lamy also believes is important.  With the extremes of climate change, the size of harvests varies more significantly than ever before – from the lows of 2021 to the highs of 2023. The pHs of wines are higher, making winemaking all the more tricky – a more challenging environment for yeast and higher risks of bacterial spoilage. Producers need to handle their wines more carefully, as well as juggle the vessels required for such extreme yield variations. If barrels are left empty, they become a breeding ground for bacteria, especially brettanomyces – so having the right number of vessels for your wine each year is essential, not to mention retaining a balance of new and old wood, to keep both a consistent style and not over- or under-oak the wines. (Some producers also only keep barrels for a certain number of years, again to avoid bacterial spoilage.)  “How can I age wine, keeping freshness, keeping purity?” says Fourrier, “Is 100% oak the direction? I don’t think so, to be honest, I think it’s a balance.” There were two options for him: either increase the level of sulphur additions, purely for the “ideology of wood” – or to evolve.  For him, using amphorae and stainless steel barrels alleviates some of these pressures – offering lower volatility, almost no bacterial risks and the vessels can be stored empty and more easily cleaned, not to mention they don’t need replacing. While he notes he is not about to release a “Cuvée Amphora”, ageing 20% of his wines in these alternatives allows for lower volatility, lower total sulphites and, in his view, helps give the wines freshness, complexity and a sense of place.   The 2022 vintage is the latest to bring these challenges to the fore; a return to a year born of global warming after the tricky, cool 2021. While for once they escaped the threat of frost, conditions were hot – although, unlike in 2019 or 2020, they received enough water to allow for a more plentiful crop. Gevrey-Chambertin saw a massive storm in June, bringing with it 100mm of rain in just an hour or so, flooding the streets of the village. Although it seemed devastating at the time, it was exactly what the vines needed to survive the dry stretch to the end of August and harvest at the start of September.  Although harvest dates creep earlier and earlier, Fourrier feels that some are picking prematurely (“We don’t do a Crémant,” he jokes). “Terroir needs to be revealed by phenolic maturity,” he explains, saying that his team started in early September. With the warmth of the year, he used around 15-20% whole-bunch to help retain freshness and elegance, and, as we’ve seen elsewhere so far, the alcohols are modest – sitting between 12.8 and 13.5%. The wines combine some of the characteristics of 2009 and 2015, Fourrier feels, yet are fresher, with an approachability that – as we have found – will make them easy to drink in their youth, despite having the structure and weight to age.  But now Fourrier’s mind is occupied by the 2023s, the wines just in the cellar – absorbed by the potential of the next vintage. It's this slow and constant evolution, the change and challenges, year in, year out, that keep him interested. With only one shot every 12 months, this business is, he says, “an internship of 40 years”. And it’s that approach – a modesty in the face of everything despite his reputation, constantly pushing forward, studying everything and never complacent – that makes Fourrier one of the region’s leading names. We’ve no doubt that his 2022s will be another display of his mastery.  Browse all current listings from Jean-Marie Fourrier and Domaine Fourrier, or read more about Burgundy 2022

The 2022 vintage in Burgundy is a year of the modern era – one born of today’s shifting climate. As the first of his wines from the year are released, Sophie Thorpe spoke to Jean-Marie Fourrier about how he’s managing global warming in the cellar – and what he thinks of 2022

We talk to iconic Burgundian winemaker Jean-Marie Fourrier about how to handle climate change in the cellar – and what he thinks of the 2022 vintage

Jean-Marie Fourrier – student and master

Student and master: Jean-Marie Fourrier

“It’s difficult when you don’t have vines, a winery, any equipment or money,” Stéphane Dief – co-owner and winemaker at Clos Manou – tells me. “You say you want to be a winemaker, but it is complicated. Our advantage, however, was being able to do exactly what we wanted.” Over the last 25 years, he and his wife Françoise have slowly grown their tiny estate in the northern reaches of the Médoc, beyond Saint-Estèphe, where they make wine that offers some of the best value in the region.  Saint-Christoly-Médoc – the miniscule village that is home to their domaine – is where Stéphane grew up, while Françoise is from less than 15km away. Although Françoise’s family had vines, neither she nor Stéphane were working in the production side of the business, but they fell in love with wine. Via his brothers-in-law – who worked at Ch. Mouton Rothschild and Ch. Rauzan-Sègla – Stéphane started tasting some special wines, buying older vintages at auction – and was soon determined to give it a go himself.  Together, the couple bought a mere 12 ares and produced their first vintage in 1998, 600 bottles that they labelled as Clos Manou – “Clos” because they felt it wasn’t grand enough to use “Château”, and “Manou”, Stéphane’s nickname. It was such a success that their hobby rapidly became a full-time gig and the duo left their day jobs in 2000.  In some ways it doesn’t sound like they were doing anything remarkable. They wanted to make attractive wines that reflected their site, and to do so with precision and care. Their ambitions were modest. And yet, for Bordeaux, their small-scale, hand-crafted approach was – and is – atypical.  They sought out specific parcels of old vines, those planted before clonal material became commonplace, favouring the natural complexity of massal selection. They chose to work only with high-density vineyards – around 10,000 vines per hectare, a point at which Stéphane feels the vines self-regulate, meaning there’s no need to green harvest and often less de-leafing required.  In principle, they are close to organic – however, in a bid to avoid dependency on copper, they use bio-controls that aren’t permitted under organics, specifically phosphonic acid. They don’t use any herbicides, insecticides or chemicals – but believe that copper, as a heavy metal that kills soil’s microbiome, is best used minimally, and they prefer to use something that doesn’t leave trace levels in the final wine.   Almost everything is done by hand, with 12 full-time employees working on the estate. There are no protocols or routines. “We do things by watching, observing our vines and drawing conclusions and echoing those conclusions the following year,” Stéphane says.  The 2003 vintage was a turning point. Robert Parker gave the wine 93 points – an incredible score for such a modest Médoc, writing that it was “better than many of the vintage’s ‘big’ names”, “drop-dead-gorgeous” and a “prodigious effort”. Given the critic was at his peak, his influence was significant – and suddenly Clos Manou was in enormous demand.  “C’est notre métier, mais notre passion aussi," Stéphane says – “It’s our profession, but it’s our passion too." That explains perhaps why, for 11 years, he didn’t take a day off. “My wife wasn’t very happy with me,” Stéphane tells me, laughing cheekily.   Today they have 18.5 hectares of vines, scattered between Saint-Christoly-Médoc and Couquèques, all within a three-kilometre radius. They sit across three different soil types – gravel over clay, limestone-clay and sand, with some sitting very close to the estuary itself. Stéphane thinks of them as three children – one of which, the gravel over clay, is naturally gifted. But just because the other two need a bit more work, doesn’t mean they are any lesser. There is, he says, no such thing as “un petit terroir”. One special parcel dates back to 1850. Planted before phylloxera swept through the region, it’s managed to survive thanks to its sandy soils. In certain vintages they make a special “Cuvée 1850” from the block.  Despite the vines averaging 45 years in age, the yields are generally good – sitting at around 50hl/ha. Stéphane emphasises that low yields don’t equate to better quality, necessarily – the balance of your vines is what matters most.  It’s undeniable that climate change has been a benefit here, beyond Saint-Estèphe, where once it was a struggle to ripen fruit. In 2018, Clos Manou had 15% alcohol – but, thanks to their clay soils, the pH was a vibrant 3.52, bringing great freshness to balance the wine. He’s still thinking about the long-term impact of the rising mercury, however, and experimenting with small portions of whole-bunch, inspired by the likes of Guillaume Pouthier at Les Carmes Haut-Brion. Stéphane feels that it can add tension and make the wines feel more dynamic, even on just 5% of the blend. “On est des vrais vignerons – comme il y a en Bourgogne," Stéphane tells me ("We are true vignerons – as there are in Burgundy"). Unlike larger properties where there are various directors who influence decisions – it’s just them deciding what to do. Despite looking further afield for their inspiration, he and Françoise don’t want to go against the grain of the region. “We want to be a bit unorthodox, but we are nevertheless Bordelais,” he says.  Clos Manou is, in essence, a family business. There’s nothing remarkable about their modest ways, but their freedom to start with a blank page has allowed them to create something that is no longer the norm. Inspired by the Bordeaux of yesteryear, everything is low-tech yet done with great precision. The wines are fresh and pure, yet distinctly savoury and earthy – with a natural intensity that points to their old vines. You can see the addition of larger oak and amphorae in more recent vintages, bringing more vibrancy. They are somehow rustic yet fine. Little has changed here since 1998; let’s hope that that remains the case, and the Dief family continue to craft humble expressions of Bordeaux that are very much extraordinary.  Browse all listings of Clos Manou or read more about Bordeaux 

At first glance, Clos Manou might seem run-of-the-mill. But this small estate in the Médoc is far from it. We sat down with Stéphane Dief to talk about how a hobby became his life, the freedom of a fresh start, and why his family’s wines are worth seeking out

We talk to Stephane Dief about his family estate in the Medoc, Clos Manou – one of Bordeaux’s best-value wines and best-kept secrets

Why Clos Manou is anything but ordinary

Anything but ordinary: Clos Manou

When visiting the cellars of Domaine Hubert Lamy, you are likely to come out a lot wiser than you were when you went in. Olivier Lamy has been experimenting ever since he joined his father at the domaine in 1995, and he loves to share his findings.  On our last visit we were given two white wines blind and asked to assess them. One thing seemed immediately clear: with its deeper colour and more developed savoury tones, one wine was older than the other. “No” he replied. “They are the same age.” Okay, perhaps the reason for such variation in development is due to the wines coming from two different quality sites – a Grand Cru versus a village wine for instance? “No, it is the same vineyard,” he replied. Perplexed, the only other solution I thought must be his high-density plantings. (Olivier has planted parts of his vineyard three times the density of the norm in Burgundy, with up to 30,000 vines per hectare), the result being smaller, more flavourful berries. Wrong again.   “Wrong experiment,” he smirks, leaving us completely stumped. He presents the two bottles and the answer lies with the capsules. Both wines have the same cork closure but one has the traditional metal capsule seal, the other bottle has been dipped in wax. It is the wax capsule that seems not only younger and fresher, but more texturally complex, yet both the wines are from exactly the same vineyard, with the same vine density and vintage. It is simply the closure that has preserved one wine so much better.   Olivier has been experimenting with closures for years. There have long been concerns about natural cork, with the risk of cork taint top of the list of potential problems, but it was the issue of premature oxidation, particularly with white Burgundy, that led Olivier to investigate whether maybe the problem lay with the closure.  Despite the drop in natural cork’s popularity and their replacement with alternative, “technical” corks and screwcaps, the natural cork still has plenty of advocates, and it remains the most sustainable and natural of solutions for many. A better understanding of the causes of cork taint has vastly improved the natural cork’s reliability and reputation, yet “being a natural product there remain irregularities in the cork,” says Olivier. Natural cork is irregular in structure, therefore allowing different levels of oxygen ingress, meaning that the same wine can mature differently depending on the specific cork, and resulting in bottle variation.  Olivier also believes the irregularities of cork have become worse in recent years due to climate change, with the warmer temperatures resulting in even less consistent cork.  The benefit of the wax capsule, according to Lamy, is that it acts like a “bandage”, offsetting the irregularities of the cork. His grandfather and many other winemakers often used wax capsules for wines destined for their personal cellars; it was the reliable ageing capacity of these wines that prompted his experiments. Trialling the effects of waxed and unwaxed capsules since 2009, he decided to use wax capsules on all his wines in 2016. Over this time, he has experimented with varying diameters and lengths of cork, different treatments, as well as testing plastic, agglomerate, and technical corks before concluding that longer (54mm), technical DIAMs (a natural cork-based agglomerate closure), under wax seal produce the best results and best protect against premature oxidation.  Does this mean we have a definitive answer to the question that has plagued white Burgundy for the last couple of decades regarding premature oxidation? While his experiments certainly seem to imply that the irregularity of natural corks could be one of the biggest culprits and wax capsules one of the most successful solutions, he does not believe it is only the cork which is at fault. “There are two problems,” he says. “Poor-quality corks and the fact that wines are more fragile these days.”  The increased fragility of white Burgundy, Lamy believes, is a modern phenomenon. Climate change produces riper grapes, combine this with too many new barrels, modern presses that are too protective and you have wines that are more susceptible to oxidation. All too aware of this concern, many vignerons, Lamy believes, attempt to overprotect their wines, adding too much anti-oxidative sulphur dioxide (SO2) throughout the winemaking process. Counter-intuitively, this in fact makes the wines more susceptible to oxidation. When wine is made in a more protective environment, the more volatile phenolics remain in the wine, whereas these will drop out of a wine  when it is made oxidatively at the early stages of vinification, resulting in a much more stable wine.   Despite vignerons’ better understanding of the effects protective winemaking has on long-term ageing, these techniques are still used by many because it makes the wines so much more approachable in their youth. Many white wines today are built on developing these youthful aromas at the expense of ageing potential, Lamy argues. This is, he says, is in direct contrast with the past, where wines were built on texture, remaining fairly closed in their youth, with the aromas only developing with age.  There are still many traditional vignerons in Burgundy producing textural white wines built to age – with Lamy (who does not enjoy young, aromatic Burgundy) being one of them. With the warming climate, he has, however, had to adapt his winemaking to protect these more fragile wines. These days he manages the press cycle according to the vintage and allows for more solids when required.  With all the wines now bottled under DIAM and wax capsules, all Lamy can do now is wait. But, if his experiments are anything to go by, the risks of premature oxidation are low. Of course, he’s not sitting back – the dynamic winemaker is looking to experiment even more, pushing the boundaries to produce the best, and most age-worthy, wine possible.

Find out more about Domaine Hubert Lamy

Premature oxidation has plagued the modern era of white Burgundy – but could it be a thing of the past? Recent research by Olivier Lamy – the experimental winemaker at the helm of Domaine Hubert Lamy – could hold the key to solving the problem. We caught up with him to find out more 

Could premature oxidation in wine-making be a thing of the past? Recent research by Olivier Lamy at Domaine Hubert Lamy holds the key to solving the problem

Domaine Hubert Lamy on the premox problem

Solving the premox problem: Olivier Lamy

I am too disorganised to call myself a collector, but I often find myself thinking about the multiple meanings of collecting. I have a room full of books left unread from one year to the next, whose mute reproach I feel every time I am in their presence. I have half a dozen radios, from Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper’s folding Brionvega TS502 to a Danish-made Beolit 707 from Bang & Olufsen, with its slide rule tuning device. I have a manual typewriter.  Most of us accumulate such random clutter. These were never possessions that were primarily about being useful – the Brionvega and the Beolit have long since been supplanted by a bluetooth speaker and a smartphone. They represent my membership of the design tribe.  The books carry other layers of meaning. My five years at university are on one shelf. The traces of the eight years I have spent writing a just-completed biography of Boris Iofan – Josef Stalin’s preferred architect – are spelled out in the titles of the books on another shelf. The typewriter was inherited from my father and it serves to remind me of childhood. The closest that I come to having a collection that a serious collector might acknowledge is in my chairs: a Rover chair that Ron Arad salvaged from a car, a Gio Ponti Superlegera, an Eames Lounger, a Harry Bertoia, George Sowden’s Palace chair from the 1983 Memphis collection and a deconstructed armchair designed by Rei Kawakubo. On a larger or smaller scale, humans develop complex relationships with their possessions that can go from the professionalism of full-blown collecting, to the casual significance of a row of junk shop finds on a mantlepiece. They can tell us a lot about ourselves. Marina Warner’s guide to the house in Hampstead, now run as a museum, in which Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, offers an arresting insight into the significance that collecting had for him. She describes the ranks of ancient bronze, ceramic and marble figures parading across the desk that Freud brought with him to London from Vienna where he no longer felt safe due to Nazi occupation in 1938. Certainly, they are beautiful, and mostly they are precious. Thanks to their association with Freud, even the few that have been established as 20th-century forgeries will have become valuable. Some are almost 4,000 years old and reflect the religious and political practices of the distant past. Others, such as Freud’s art deco cigar case, come less freighted with history. But as Warner says, “they were also tools of thought, the kitchen utensils of his imagination”.   The batterie de cuisine of psychoanalysis included Egyptian coffin masks from the Roman period, Chinese jade and gold brooches, Roman glass, a 2,500-year-old sphinx, sarcophagus lids, Babylonian cylinder seals and Egyptian heart scarabs, as well as a 19th-century neck rest from New Guinea, modern metal porcupines, and Balinese figures. The pieces in pride of place on his desk, placed in apparently random order, were his special favourites, a tiny fraction of his collection that had become permanent fixtures. From time to time, Freud made space for a few new acquisitions to get a look in. “A collection to which there are no new additions is really dead,” he told his biographer Ernest Jones. After a short interval, most of the new things would be moved into the glass-fronted cabinets positioned around his study, where they were placed in more organised groups than those standing on his desk. Greek sculptures went on a shelf together. A cluster of representations of the Egyptian god Horus were grouped on another.  In Freud’s lifetime, the collection was continually changing. Before his move to London, he toured Vienna’s antiquities dealers almost every week on the look-out for new finds. He was ready to exchange pieces for items he could not afford to buy, and was generous in gifting pieces to friends and pupils he thought would appreciate them. Freud also had no qualms about buying items that came on the market in questionable circumstances, in particular, from the unofficial excavations (sometime after 1906) at a Roman fort in Hungary.   Despite the important part it played in his life, Freud wrote very little about collecting. The nearest that he came to spelling out what drove his interest in fragments of ancient sculpture, was when he compared his own exploration of the unconscious minds of his patients to an archaeological excavation of an ancient city. “The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist, must uncover layer after layer of the patient’s psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures.”  Freud was known to share his dining table with choice specimens to act as companions during a meal. “I must always have an object to love”, he confessed to his colleague and rival Carl Jung. When he was writing his book The Interpretation of Dreams in 1895, Freud spent the summer at Schloss Bellevue outside Vienna. He took a selection of what he called “my old grubby gods who take part in the works as paperweights for the manuscripts” with him.  Before Freud left Austria for England in 1938, his desk, his consulting room, and his study at Berggasse 19 were photographed by Edmund Engelman. Engelman’s 150 images helped Freud’s architect son Ernst to transpose the desk and its contents from a dark back room in a Viennese apartment to a sunlit Hampstead villa.  Like most collectors, Freud could never limit himself to a single field. Ronald Lauder the former MoMA chairman, for example, is known for the collection of Viennese modernism that forms the basis for his own museum, the Neue Galerie in New York. He also collects (in depth) in 15 other fields with little apparent connection between them. Lauder is fascinated by the work of the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. He has a collection of arms and armour going back to The Crusades, and another of World War Two memorabilia. He owns some of Egon Schiele’s finest works, as well as various 18th-century French artworks. Fellow collector Rolf Fehlbaum (head of Vitra) has one of the largest collections of modern chairs in the world, and gave Frank Gehry his first European commission to design a gallery for it, but he is equally fascinated by toy robots manufactured in Japan since 1937. He calls them tiny kinetic sculptures. Where possible, he acquires their original packaging too. Perhaps the best way to understand the psychology of collecting is to see it as a spectrum. At one end, it is about order and control. In a messy and uncontrollable universe, a collection offers at least a semblance of certainty. A collection of this kind is based on provenance, completeness and authenticity. An over-restored vintage Bugatti is less desirable to a collector than one in original condition.  Every previous owner, every detail of its making forms part of its record. A red Olivetti typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass that once belonged to David Bowie was sold at Sotheby’s for US$65,000. You can buy one (that hasn’t been owned by Bowie) for US$750, which is still a lot of money for a piece of obsolete technology. Some collectors attempt to make patterns from the things that they acquire or, like jigsaw puzzlers, set out to complete a picture by locating every piece of a set. Some try to document the evolution of a species whether the subject of their interest is biscuit tins or the eggs of a particular type of bird. Some forms of collecting require the active engagement of the collector. Wildflowers need to be picked and dried quickly before they are pressed into a book. Butterfly collectors used macabre methods such as poison jars, or squeezing the thorax, to dispatch their prey without causing so much distress that they risk damaging delicate wings. At the other end of the spectrum, the accumulation of stuff by people who die alone in homes overwhelmed by stacks of ancient newspapers and tins of cat food, is a kind of sickness. It’s a condition that can overwhelm even the most celebrated of artists. In the last 17 years of his life, Andy Warhol filled a succession of cardboard boxes with a seemingly random accumulation of objects: taxi receipts, a vinyl Ramones single signed by Joey Ramone, a piece of an ancient, mummified foot, pastel-coloured corsets and a selection of metal dentures. Every time he had a full box, it was sealed and shipped off to storage in a warehouse in New Jersey. A typical box has 400 objects in it, some have as many as 1,200. Items in them include a piece of Caroline Kennedy’s wedding cake – Warhol seems to have been a regular guest at Kennedy weddings. He showed up 20 minutes after the wedding ceremony for Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger had started, in the company of Grace Jones. He was in black leather, and wearing two wigs; she had on a huge green fur hat.   Warhol’s boxes are a collection of the uncollectable and the uncontrollable, which, thanks to the resources of the Andy Warhol Foundation, has been tamed after six years of work by a dedicated group of archivists and cataloguers. The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has aestheticised the cardboard boxes. They sit on back-lit shelves in the museum to suggest that this is not a random collection of trash that Warhol never looked at, but, in the view of the museum, is in fact a time-based art piece, comprising at least 500,000 objects that took 30 years to complete. It presents a considerably less impressive sight than British Regency period architect Sir John Soane’s museum. The architect of the Bank of England put as much effort into adapting his Lincoln’s Inn Fields house (and subsequently the two adjoining houses) to display his Hogarth paintings, a sarcophagus and his architectural models, as he did to accumulating the collection itself. The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence is an eloquent exploration of the hoarding end of the collecting spectrum. What initially appears to be an account of a doomed love affair, quickly reveals itself as an exploration of the meaning of collecting. The story’s main protagonist Kemal starts acquiring things when his relationship with his lover Füsun is going well. When she drops an earring, he finds it and puts it to one side. As Füsun falls out of love with him, Kemal begins an increasingly desperate accumulation of objects that record their relationship. He picks up each of the cigarettes that she smokes. When she has stopped seeing him altogether, Kemal starts hanging around at her parents’ house and stealing pieces of cutlery that she might have used.  What makes Pamuk’s book particularly remarkable is that he acquired a house in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district that had belonged to a Greek merchant in the Ottoman era, and transformed it into a physical Museum of Innocence. It is, of course, very far from innocent; everything inside it is a lovingly created fiction. The first thing that you see once you get inside, is a wall covered with 4,213 cigarette ends, each of them carefully annotated in Pamuk’s neat handwriting, with imaginary details of the time and place they were smoked. The rest of the house is full of equally carefully fabricated objects from cosmetics to movie posters that reflect Pamuk’s vision of the modernising Turkey of the 1970s. “I think getting attached to objects happens in traumatic times and love is a trauma,” Pamuk once said. “Perhaps when they are in trouble, people hoard things.”  When Pamuk gave me a tour of his museum, he told me about meeting Warhol’s archivist, and expressed his reservations about the significance of the boxes in Pittsburgh. “Hoarding objects reaches the level of collecting only when there is a story that unites them,” he said. But that is a novelist criticising another, less narrative art form. While Freud’s desk in Hampstead was always useable, if overcrowded, the desk in fashion designer Paul Smith’s office in Covent Garden is completely overwhelmed with a snowdrift of collected objects that sweeps over an office chair, down onto the floor, and back up to the shelves that line every wall. There are stacks of books and magazines, cameras and mountains of vintage cycling jerseys. There is an i-Mac computer, a gift from Jony Ive that Smith has never used. Computers aren’t Smith’s thing. In any case, it’s too late now, short of purging half the contents of the room: there is no way to get near it. There are toy tin cars, collections of bottles from Moroccan markets, a pink bicycle and a lot of rabbits. “I once said in an interview that seeing a rabbit brings me luck, and they haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,” explains Smith. Collecting began, as did so many things in Smith’s career, with his early enthusiasm for cycling. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1950s, there was a newsagent which occasionally had a copy of L’Equipe, which would portray the heroes of the Tour de France in their yellow jerseys in colour on the cover, but in sepia inside. He bought the magazine, fascinated by the images, even if he couldn’t read it. “I can remember once saying, ‘I really like Jacques Anquetil’ to my father, which baffled him, since none of our family had ever been abroad. I saved my pocket money so that I could upgrade the gears on my bike from Simplex to Campagnolo. The box it came in was as important to me as the gear itself.”  What attracted Smith to the Campagnolo box, along with stamps and matchboxes which he has in large numbers – not just in his office but at his Nottingham HQ where he has an archivist trying to make sense of it all – is the way that designers can say so much in such a tiny space. He showed me a Japanese book of matches produced for a Tokyo nightclub in the 1970s. “It so clearly says it’s ‘contemporary’. You can hear the jazz already.”  Despite the huge assortment of assembled objects, Smith is reluctant to describe himself as a collector. “I just have a large quantity of the same things,” he says, matter of factly. “In my head, a collector is someone who selects an item or a subject. They collect them because they know a lot about them. Maybe I have a little knowledge about cycling jerseys.  In the early 1980s, on my first trips to Japan and India, I just got a bit carried away. I bought lots of Japanese furniture. In India, for some reason, I bought 15 wardrobes, and a piece of furniture that doubled as a staircase with drawers.” Smith had them all sent home on the Trans-Siberian Express.  He suggests that his is a collection that has found him. “Things collect me,” he says. “For some reason I started to be sent things, and they still keep coming.” There is an individual who regularly sends Smith artefacts that come unwrapped but covered in postage stamps. Others send him letters, toys, books and even ancient packets of razor blades. One visitor took careful photographs of his office, and later sent him a precisely detailed model of his office, complete with its chaotic contents. Smith’s London home, where he lives with his wife Pauline, is much calmer. “The house is hers. I do have one room for my stuff, but it’s mostly at the office that I get to look at things.” In 1996, patron of the arts and barrister Jill Ritblat gave the V&A Museum the largest single donation of clothes in its history, more than 1,000 items. There are ski outfits in postmodern pastel shades from the 1980s, and challenging Japanese experiments from Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, as well as couture from Dior and Saint Laurent. There is work by Alexander McQueen, Biba, Mary Quant, and Christian Lacroix, Emanuel Ungaro and Victor Edelstein, and an evening outfit produced by a dressmaker based on an idea of Ritblat’s own design.  The early days of British fashion from the 1960s are represented by Foale and Tuffin, and Zandra Rhodes, and from the 1980s by Margaret Howell and Katharine Hamnett. There is tailoring from Tommy Nutter and work by Giorgio Armani. It is by no means a complete account of contemporary fashion, but it is certainly extensive, and like the personal wardrobe that it is, combines some very special pieces made for family occasions, with more everyday wear. The connecting thread of Ritblat’s collection is Ritblat herself. These were all pieces that she had bought to wear. They were not chosen like stamps, or old masters, or celadon vases to make a self-conscious collection, but were the result of a continuing sequence of choices over time. Taken together they are a reflection of her life as an English woman of a certain background, at a particular time in the country’s history. “I never saw it as a collection, it was more like my diary, though I have never had time to write a diary. Each piece brings back memories of when I wore it,” says Ritblat. She made her first donation to the V&A at the end of 1996, but kept back the things that she wanted to be able to go on using, and they formed the core of a donation to the Design Museum of another 400 items in 2013. Ritblat is ambivalent about fashion. As a child she was somewhat self-conscious about being dressed by her mother, who had studied fashion herself. She was relieved to be able to assume the camouflage of the complex uniform rituals of an English public school for girls in the 1950s. “I loved my school uniform at Roedean; we were expected to change our clothes four times a day, as chic as anything. Scratchy afternoon dresses, regulation school loafers, very nice blazers and pleated skirts.” As a student barrister, she found herself adopting the formal uniform of the legal profession, but then as a married woman began to build a wardrobe that reflected the life that she was leading. Later, when she was making her own choices, she was early to discover Miuccia Prada. “What you pick out is based on whether it suits you and on the zeitgeist,” she explains. Smith, Heseltine and Ritblat represent three very different approaches to collecting. For Smith, the unruly mountain of things in his office, is, like the collection on Sigmund Freud’s desk, part of the tools of his imagination, a source of imagery and ideas for his work as a designer. It’s also a means of establishing his personality. Heseltine’s garden is an investment of time, resources and creativity in the remaking of a place that speaks to the future using living organisms that will outlive us all. Ritblat’s clothes are a record of the full life of an individual. All of these collections provide insights into unique people, their lives and times. In their different ways all three reflect on the nature of collecting, and its ability to be a creative activity in itself. In a world in which technology threatens to abolish the material world altogether, objects have not lost their allure. Their physical condition marks the passing of time in ways that pixels and code cannot do. Collecting is the means all of us have to create histories of our times, and even more, of ourselves. This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Two. 

In order to explore the mindset of the collector, Deyan Sudjic shines a light on the collected objects of Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol, and speaks to three British collectors to better understand what it is that makes collecting such a vital part of the human experience.

Exploring the mindset of the collector and why the act is a vital part of the human experience, with a focus on Sigmund Freud and Andy Warhol

FONDATA: Exploring the art of collecting 

 I Collect, Therefore I Am

Metala Vineyards

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