You could call them ‘patches of dirt’. Many do. It’s strange, though, that flippant disparagement: soil is the basis of human nutrition. No soil; no us. And vineyard soil stands at the summit of agriculture: the world’s greatest vineyards are the most prized and expensive morsels of agricultural land anywhere on our planet. This tells us two things. The first is that the chance to drink and taste great wine is a peerless pleasure for which those with resources will pay beyond reason. And the second is that only this patch of dirt will do. Only this patch makes that wine.
Great vineyards are unique; they elude duplication or substitution. We don’t yet fully understand why this is so, especially since such uniqueness is opaque in grape juice, the primary agricultural product, and only becomes apparent after the transformations of fermentation and ageing. But it is so.
Hence this feature. Why, long-term Decanter readers may exclaim, haven’t you done this before? The answer is that it’s so damn difficult. Our valiant contributors have fought their way through a blizzard of challenges to come up with this dozen, but we fully expect the list to be criticised and challenged again. We still think it’s worth doing – as a talking point, as a focus for reflection, as an incentive. And for fun.
NO EASY TASK
Lists of this sort are subjective. That was why we canvassed widely first, but our top choices are no less subjective for all that. One obstacle is that vineyard definitions vary between regions. The ideal is the Burgundian climat – and Burgundy’s long standing as ‘the vineyard region’ par excellence encouraged us to select two of its own, one for white and one for red. Bordeaux is as great, yet the fact that most of its wines are sold under the name of a commercial entity (the château), and those wines blended anew from a different selection of vineyard parcels every year, makes it problematic from a pure vineyard perspective.
Another major challenge is that a vineyard’s worth is only proved in time – half a century or more, let’s say. Many of today’s key regions haven’t yet had 50 years of close scrutiny, fastidious viticulture and limpid yet ambitious winemaking in their finest sites. We’ve made educated guesses about where greatness may lie in this case, but they are guesses which await the proof of time.
And then… meet the wily brands. In regions where vineyard identities are only slowly emerging (and this would apply as much to Champagne, the Rhône or Piedmont as it would to non-European regions), canny branding by powerful commercial entities can ‘make the case’ for a particular vineyard long before the potential of its peers has had a chance to emerge.
Are Clos des Goisses (Philipponnat), Clos du Mesnil and Clos d’Ambonnay (both Krug) truly the greatest single vineyards in Champagne? They may be – or there may be greater vineyards still hidden away in the region’s finest blends, or in the hands of growers who have yet to break through commercially or perfect their winemaking. We don’t know.
MATTER OF CONJECTURE
What about accessibility? We felt obliged to set this aside in the search for absolute quality, but we’re aware that (for example) the wine of any Burgundian vineyard meriting inclusion in a list of this sort will be, by dint of price, inaccessible to almost all of us. That’s not, though, a reason for exclusion from this list of the ‘12 greatest’.
One last thing to mention: a vineyard is a human creation. The site itself rarely if ever insists on the boundaries that owners, cultivators and administrators have set. That’s happenstance. We may not, in this as in other respects, have the best of all possible worlds.
Nonetheless, and for all its failings, here it is:
