Harvest, 2025
Friday March 20th.
Outside there is a peace settled on the vineyards. Barely a breeze, clear perfect skies, and gentle warmth following the cold early morning that typifies the harvest season. We are about half a dozen days from kick off, barrels are delivered, cleaning steadily works it’s way through every corner of each tank and piece of equipment. Picking bins are washed and ready. In one way it is like the calm before the storm, but these days harvest itself is pretty calm, we have its measure, especially when, like this one, it all looks to be in good shape.
Today the head winemaking and viticulture team had their first formal taste of 2024 vintage. A lot of wineries spend a lot of time revisiting and discussing the wines as they go through their evolution, but we leave them alone. It was only a couple of weeks ago that they were assembled into their final cuvées then sent back to barrel to await bottling. So, two weeks to calm down from the racking and we can discuss the finished wines.
Inevitably we do this blind and everybody wants to get the full set right. Tasting the 6 Pinots and 3 Chardonnays and getting them all correct may seem trivial when you are the ‘expert’ who grew and made the stuff, but the maths is a little more challenging: there are 362,880 ways you could guess, so the odds are strongly against you.
This year one person scored 100%: not surprisingly it was Larissa, who, as Blair’s number 2, is the person closest to all those barrels. That raises an interesting point: if even the team struggle to score them all at a given tasting, is there truly such a thing as Cornishpointness, or MacMuirness?
We have absolute confidence in their ability to express their place, and do so reliably, but that isn’t the same as taking a sniff and a sip, then proclaiming with 100% certainty. Let’s take the analogy of a songwriter. There are many lines that are quintessential and clear to anyone who is an ardent follower: Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Annie Lennox, all these people have classic lines that one could think of that are the very difference their skill and personality creates. But that doesn’t mean that every line they write could be ascribed that way. Paul Simon created ‘There must be 50 ways to leave your lover’, but he also wrote lines like ‘Beneath a stony sky with a slow moon rising’ which, in truth might have come from any of the sextet I chose. The scholar might spot it because they know all the songs, but try to do that with a song not heard before, because that is what we are trying to do.
So, when we are doing that tasting, what we talk about most is what characters are we seeing most clearly? And what leads us astray? Ultimately we come to realise that the fact that all the conversation is about such nuance means we did a good job; we aren’t debating what went wrong but the subtleties of what went right.
In a week’s time we get to roll the dice again.
