GREEN PAGES Wine

THIS MONTH’S VINEYARD: CHÂTEAU RICHARD

Monty Waldin discovers why giving grape bunches space to breathe leads to riper-tasting and more intense wines

Château Richard’s organic vineyards produce some of southwest France’s most consistently enjoyable and easy-toget-to-grips-with wines. They are ripe-tasting, clean and intensely fl avoured. In fact, Château Richard is a rare example of a French wine estate that produces both dry and sweet whites, red and even rosé wines of high quality. Most winemakers manage to get just the one type of wine right – perhaps the whites and rosés in a cooler year, or the reds in a hotter one – but few seem to be able to maintain, as Château Richard does, top quality across the board, year in and year out, for all of its wines. Even more unusually, Château Richard is owned by a Brit – Richard Doughty. There are plenty of ex-pats making wine in foreign

lands, but few can match this bear-like man for determination and skill. Born in Windsor, Doughty took over the 17-hectare (42-acre) Château Richard near Bergerac in 1988. ‘For the fi rst few years, I didn’t have many grapes as we got hit by spring frost and hail, which reduced the amount of wine we could make, and rain at harvesttime which adversely affected quality,’ says Richard, ‘and we almost went bankrupt.’ However, Doughty by name and, er, doughty by nature, Richard stuck at it, and converted to organic methods as soon as was practicable. ‘I love walking around my vineyards,’ says Richard, ‘and so do the tourists who pay to stay in our holiday appartment, or gîte rurale. I want to be sure that the air we are all breathing is not polluted by vineyard chemicals, potentially dangerous substances that you have no need of if you get your soils in balance. If your soil is balanced, your vines will be more naturally resistant to disease. So, instead of spending money and time spraying chemicals against diseases you should never have in the fi rst place, you can concentrate on doing jobs in the vineyard that promote quality.’

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One key practice here is removing excess leaves and water shoots from around the grape bunches in early summer. ‘This allows light and wind around the grape bunches. They get more sunlight, so you get riper-tasting and more intense wines, and it means that when it does rain, the moisture dries quickly, so you don’t get rot.’ Château Richard is located between the famous wine towns of Bordeaux and Bergerac in southwest France’s Dordogne valley. ‘Rainfall levels here are some of the highest in France due to westerlies coming in off the Atlantic,’ says Richard, who knows a thing or two about oceans, having trained as a geographer and an oceanographer. ‘The other real benefi t of maintaining a healthy, airy leaf zone is that healthy populations of wild yeast are more likely to form on the grapeskins,’ explains Richard. ‘You can see these wild yeasts on the grapeskins as a whitish-grey, powder-like or waxy layer which we winegrowers called the ‘bloom’. Individual wild yeast cells are microscopic, but they are fl oating all around us all of the time: in the home, in the offi ce and, of course, in the wild.

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076 THE ECOLOGIST