With his cuvée Largillier, he’d masterfully push his father’s method for lees ageing to new heights – 36 months in barrels and a year in tanks – distinguishing himself as a brilliant winemaker in his own right. Sons have always sought emancipation from fathers, but never before have young winemakers had such access to expertise outside the family. For his master’s in oenology, Murray Barlow left Stellenbosch and headed across the world to the University of Adelaide, with its cutting-edge wine-focused Waite Research Institute. He’d study alongside Israelis, Americans, Canadians, Indians and New Zealanders, future wine professionals who now constitute a personal brain trust which Barlow can tap anytime. “If I have a question about a type of barrel, a certain clone of a variety, a disease or any problem, invariably I’m not the first person to have seen it. So that network is invaluable.” Returning home in 2012, Barlow was named Rustenberg’s cellar master, though some considered him too green for the challenge. The following vintage, he was named South Africa’s Young Winemaker of the Year by Diners Club International. Like Barlow, who came home to a winery in need of consolidation following a post-apartheid boom, in 2007, Riccardo Pasqua joined Pasqua Vigneti e Cantine, a large Veronese winery founded by his grandfather in 1925, at a turning point. “I arrived during a period of difficulty … our company had become just one of many Italian wineries with a good reputation, but without that sparkle that makes it stand out.” In 2009, Riccardo headed to New York to help Pasqua conquer the US market for the first time, and discovered his entrepreneurial genes. “It changed my life,” he recalls. “The most significant thing I brought back was the conviction that we should not be scared of dreaming big, which is a capacity we too often lack in Italy. For me, it was the first injection of that sparkle I’d been seeking, which led to Pasqua becoming what it is today.” In 2015, Riccardo was named Pasqua’s CEO and began developing a new series of wines, from its PassioneSentimento (a wonderfully fresh, modern expression of the traditional appassimento/dried-berry technique), to its cheekily named, multivintage-blend white soave, “Hey French You Could Have Made This But You Didn’t”, to its austere, eminently complex amarone “Mai Dire Mai” – a revolution in an era of overdone, opulent amarones. The wines conquered the traditional wine press, but also the rising class of social media wine influencers, which Pasqua has aggressively courted from Twitter to TikTok. Today, Pasqua styles itself as the “House of Unconventional”, supporting the arts, and with poet Arch Hades of Instagram fame as a brand ambassador. What does this have to do with selling wine? Ask Aly Wente O’Neal, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Wente Vineyards, the California estate her ancestors founded in 1883. “I’ve been pushing us to think differently, much like in the world of spirits, where they’re showing a lifestyle, and how a brand can embody your personality, how you want to live,” she says. “We can’t only talk about the past. Our history is great and it gives authenticity to our brand, but I don’t know that it’s going to get a Gen Z to drink our wines.” Wente Vineyards’ online platform portrays an estate with a carpe diem attitude, dedicated to food and nature but also family and sustainability – values they live daily. In 2022, they were awarded the California Wine Institute’s Green Medal Leader Award for environmentally sound, socially equitable and economically viable practices. Sustainability, climate change – these are challenges now shared by estates across the globe. Indeed, on many levels, the line between the Old World and New World of wine is now blurring. “Traditionally, New World signified big, fruity, high-alcohol wines, and Old World suggested more savoury, moderate alcohol, leaner wines, but that’s all been turned on its head,” says Murray Barlow. “Plenty of bordeaux exceeds 14 per cent alcohol today, while in places like Australia, there’s a move away from that very ripe, extracted style back to something far more elegant and subtle.” In the Old World, such qualities are often attributed to terroir, a French concept, and yet today arguably the preeminent authority on terroir is an Argentinian – Dr Laura Catena, a Harvard-educated biologist and the fourth-generation head of Mendoza’s Bodega Catena Zapata. Laura founded the Catena Institute of Wine, which in 2021 published a study in Scientific Reports said to “irrefutably prove the existence of terroir” by comparing the phenolic composition of wines from 23 distinct parcels across Mendoza over three vintages. The wine world may be turning upside down, but today’s crop of winemakers hasn’t forgotten the primacy of soil. 92
THE NEW GUARD The proof, as always, is in the bottle – and here are nine remarkable wines, representing fresh takes on old terroirs by next-generation winemakers. By Jeffrey T Iverson FRANCE GERMANY ARGENTINA DOMAINE DIDIER DAGUENEAU BLANC ETC… 2019 VIN DE FRANCE Didier Dagueneau, the most celebrated winemaker of the Loire’s Pouilly Fumé appellation, died in a tragic plane accident in 2008. Few imagined anyone could be capable of carrying on the legacy of this sauvignon blanc master, a man who revolutionised both viticulture and winemaking in the Loire Valley. Yet that’s precisely what Didier’s 25-year-old son Louis-Benjamin Dagueneau did, taking over the estate with his sister Charlotte, and only raising the bar higher. In 2016, at 33 years old, he was named winemaker of the year by France’s leading industry magazine, Revue du Vin de France. In 2019, Louis-Benjamin also raised eyebrows for battling with French labelling authorities for excluding one of his wines from the appellation as atypical. Finally, he decided to label his wines Vin de France, forsaking the Pouilly Fumé appellation his father once embodied. His round, full-bodied, age-worthy cuvée “Blanc Fumée” was reborn as Blanc Etc..., a nod to Serge Gainsbourg’s scandalous hit “Aux armes, etc…”, a reggae rendition of France’s national anthem intended as a snub to the establishment. Louis-Benjamin’s iconoclastic father would have approved. WEINGUT VON HÖVEL SCHARZHOFBERGER GROSSES GEWÄCHS (GRAND CRU) 2020 DRY RIESLING Distance makes the heart grow fonder – so it was for Maximilian von Kunow, the seventh-generation head of Weingut von Hövel, an estate founded in the Saar valley in 1803 and one of the few to own vines on Germany’s most famous slope – Scharzhofberg, the temple of riesling. After his winemaking studies, Maximilian left to work at estates from the United States to South Africa. Along the way, he came to know his palate – preferring wines made using minimal oenological intervention – and realise how lucky he was. “The chance to make wine on the Scharzhofberg is beyond words, it’s like being allowed to make a La Tâche,” he says. “Nowhere else in the world can you produce so many different riesling styles on one hill.” Returning to head Von Hövel in 2010, Maximilian expanded his range from this slope, renowned for its wines bottled at varying levels of residual sugar, by creating dry wines. To taste his acclaimed Scharzhofberger Grosses Gewächs (Grand Cru), a dry riesling embodying the Scharzhofberg’s exquisite saltiness and cassis and gooseberry aromas, we understand why. BODEGA CATENA ZAPATA ADRIANNA VINEYARD, MUNDUS BACILLUS TERRAE, 2018 MALBEC Founded in 1902, Bodega Catena Zapata is Argentina’s oldest family-owned winery, today managed by fourth-generation winemaker Dr Laura Catena. Synonymous with the rebirth of malbec, it was under Laura’s father Nicolás the estate first earned its reputation. Inspired by the California winemakers who shocked France’s greatest estates in the Judgment of Paris tasting, he sought to reveal the potential of Argentina to make wines of complexity and freshness, leading to his planting Mendoza’s first high-altitude malbec vineyards, including the Adrianna vineyard, now known as “South America’s Grand Cru”. As a Harvard-educated biologist and physician, Laura has intensely researched these high-altitude vineyards, where the amplitude between day and night temperatures increases, and the wines develop disproportionately higher levels of tannins, adding to their power, texture and richness. The vineyard’s limestone soils, never tainted by pesticides, are particularly rich in rhizobacteria, the micro-organisms that help vine roots absorb nutrients. Thus, the name “mundus bacillus terrae” or “elegant microbes of the earth” was given to Adrianna’s remarkable malbec cuvée, a “deep, decadent red” for which critic James Suckling gave 98 points. 93
