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Fast-Car Fiend Turned Burgundy Winemaker

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| L-R: Pinot noir vines at Domaine David Clark; the enterprising owner; wine maturing

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By Rebecca Gibb | Posted Monday, 31-Dec-2012

The owner of Domaine David Clark has abandoned organic viticulture and started maturing his pinot noir in demijohns. What on earth will he do next?

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By Rebecca Gibb | Posted Thursday, 03-Jan-2013

Trundling along the lanes of Morey-Saint-Denis on his 1975 tractor, David Clark couldn’t be further removed from the high-speed glamor of Formula 1 racing. Yet his new life as a Burgundian wine producer wouldn’t have been possible without a lucrative stint as an engineer with the British racing team Williams. The man behind Domaine David Clark isn’t your average Burgundy wine producer. For a start, he’s Scottish. Raised in a dour boarding school when his parents moved to the United States, he grew up to be well acquainted with “cold showers and cross country runs," lumpy custard, and the bright-orange-colored Scottish soda Irn Bru. “The food wasn’t very good. In hindsight, I wouldn’t be surprised if the deprivation of boarding school inspired a taste for the better things in life,” says Clark. In his first graduate job, fueled by a decent pay packet and a liquor store that was dangerously close to home, he discovered wine. It must have been an epiphany, as he was soon handing in his notice at IBM and heading off to work a harvest at Mayacamas in Napa, followed by a stint at Marsanne maestro Tahbilk in Australia. But large-scale winemaking left him as cold as the showers at boarding school. “I wanted to make wine on my own terms and to do that you need a bit of capital," says Clark. "Totally coincidentally, having done an engineering degree, I saw an ad for a software engineer at Williams and though there was no harm in applying.” So after just two vintages he left the wine industry to make some money – and help Formula 1 drivers shave a few hundredths of a second off their lap times. Within five years, he was armed with a wedge of hard cash and a one-way ticket to Burgundy to learn the wine game. He enrolled in the local winemaking college in Beaune for a one-year crash course. But the money he'd saved must have been burning a hole in his pocket: part-way through the course he saw an advert for a parcel of vines, two-thirds of an acre in size. Instead of completing a two-week pruning internship at one of the local estates, he ended up in his own vineyards, doing the winter trimming. This proved to be a source of interest for the locals. What was this inexperienced Scotsman doing on their patch? Clark made himself all the more conspicuous in his first few months by attempting to change the traditional vine-trellising system – perhaps as a result of his New World experience.

http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2013/01/from-fast-cars-to-burgundy[04.01.2013 08:08:01]

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| L-R: Flourishing vines; tending the vineyard in winter

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“For some reason I had it in my head that it would be much better if the vines were By Rebecca Gibb | Posted Tuesday, trellised higher, so the first thing I did was change all the posts," Clark recalls. "They 20-Nov-2012 were 1 meter 60 [cm]. I attracted a lot of attention because there was this complete stranger working in the vineyard, and in the winter everybody sees you. There are no Modern Hotel Managers Learn to Speak "Finance" trees and no leaves on the vines to hide behind. A lot of people stopped and asked what on earth I was doing.” Switzerland's l'Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne trains its In reality, even Clark wasn’t sure what he was doing, and the high posts were cut students for jobs at the top. back to size a year later. Inevitably, it was a steep learning curve for the rookie By AFP with Wine-Searcher staff | winemaker. Posted Monday, 05-Nov-2012 “When you make your first vintage, you have zero knowledge so you have to try Merlot, Terrine, things to find out what you like.” Having experimented with whole-bunch Andouillette: French fermentations and different oak regimes, the latest harebrained idea is to age his Muslims Get More Options pinot noir in glass demijohns. In a region where tradition is king, Clark is proving that Innovative wine and food he is either a nonconformist or a bit cuckoo. producers bid to capture a Admittedly, demijohns are used in the Banyuls appellation, where fortified wines made share of the $452 million from grenache are aged oxidatively in demijohns – often in the heat of the sun. But it halal market. isn’t a Burgundian method. “I’m pretty sure I’m the only one in Burgundy aging significant amounts of wine in demijohns,” says Clark.

The first trial, in 2011, "wasn’t a massive success, to be honest.” Clark laughs a little nervously. And he's right to be nervous: when you produce just 11 barrels a year, you can’t afford to lose much in offbeat trials. Undeterred, he’s trying again with the latest vintage. There are now 12 demijohns, each stoppered with caps of differing oxygen permeability to monitor the wines' development under various conditions. “I won’t be leaving them outside in the sun, though,” he adds. Sun was in short supply in 2012. Frost, rain, hail, and storms reduced Burgundy's crop levels by about 30 percent, while volumes in the Côte de Beaune region were down by 50–70 percent. Somehow,the 2012 production at Domaine David Clark was slightly higher than 2011! But maintaining his crop levels in the face of high disease pressure was not without its sacrifices for Clark: he had to abandon his organic certification.

By AFP | Posted Tuesday, 30-Oct2012

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| Currently farming one hectare of vines, David Clark is looking for more land

By AFP with Wine-Searcher staff | Posted Thursday, 11-Oct-2012

Unwilling to “tolerate losing crop,” Clark got in his 16-year old Renault Clio and headed to the local vineyard-products store to buy some synthetic fungicides.

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"Such a shame," the store owner said. "Isn’t there somebody else’s account, you could buy it on?" It’s a worrying anecdote for supporters of organic farming in Burgundy, but not altogether surprising. “I don’t think it’s a shame. I saved the quality and the quantity of my crop – and I had already become skeptical about the ecological benefits of organic,” Clark insists.

By AFP with Wine-Searcher staff | Posted Wednesday, 03-Oct-2012

http://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2013/01/from-fast-cars-to-burgundy[04.01.2013 08:08:01]

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Fast-Car Fiend Turned Burgundy Winemaker

His domaine won’t be returning to organic certification in the future. “I was happy to use 2012 as an excuse to drop out of the scheme,” he explains. “Organics is a system that doesn’t evolve; it’s a rejection of science. It allows you to use a certain set of chemicals and won’t introduce anything new. It’s easy to be critical of science and progress, but people are happier living in heated and airconditioned homes than caves.” Leaving organic production behind, Clark is on the prowl for new land. He sold one hectare of vines that were classified as Bourgogne and Bourgogne Passetoutgrains in 2010, because the land wasn't paying its way. That's left him with a single hectare of village-level vines. “I’d love to find some more good vineyards to farm in 2013,” he says. “Producing 3,500 bottles [each year] is just not enough to satisfy the markets” )which include the U.K., America, Japan and Australia). But first, he's been back in Scotland spending Christmas and Hogmanay with his family. Never mind the food and wine of Burgundy; he was looking forward to a decent pint of beer at a proper pub and heading to the local takeway for a fish supper. 3 < Older Story Like

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