Wine that tastes the way it used to

Standing in the middle of my Chardonnay vines, hose in hand, watering them for the third time this summer — the fourth day in a row — my mind wandered off to a visit I paid, some time ago, to a fellow winemaker in Ticino.

You'll be forgiven if you've never heard of Tankred Götsch. But if you're an agroforestry nerd, you may know his father, Ernst Götsch — the founding father of syntropic farming, a regenerative method of growing many species tightly together. The full story of syntropic farming is a newsletter of its own; today I just want to tell you about one thing Tankred showed me.

On his own vineyard in Mergoscia, Tankred has revived an old way of growing vines: not on a trellis of metal wire, but up a living companion tree. Vine and tree are pruned back together each winter, resetting for the next season. A few hundred years ago, this was simply how vines were grown. The Italians call it vite maritata — the married vine.

Tankred took me to an old vineyard nearby where perhaps 90% of the vines were long dead and gone. What struck me was the 10% still alive: every single one of them was growing next to a tree. Somehow, the partnership with the tree had kept them going, long after their neighbors on wire had given up.

And there I was, alone in the middle of my own young, tidy monoculture, watering it for the third time this summer, marinating in the absurdity of my predicament. The grapevine, after all, is a forest-edge plant. It didn't evolve to climb wire — it evolved to climb trees. Every trellis we've built for it since is, in a sense, a workaround.

The health and longevity of the vines are of course things every farmer cares about, but what is maybe more important is how the trees influence the flavor of the wine. The tree has an impact on the microbial composition in the soil. This, in turn, has an influence on what minerals the microbes deliver to the trees and vines, and these minerals are the building blocks of the flavor profile of the wine.

We have already planted a number of trees in our vineyards, and we plan on dramatically increase their numbers in the coming winter. No more monocultures! I look forward to being able to share the wine from these “forest vineyards” with you in the not-too-distant future.