GREAT SUCCESSIONS IN WINE

Taking over the reins of their family’s heritage-imbued wineries from Champagne to California, next-gen vintners are forging new paths with eco-conscious production, stepped-up scienti c acumen and, above all, exciting vintages.

By Je rey T Iverson

Illustrations by DANILO AGUTOLI

An art as old as civilisation itself, viticulture has evolved alongside humankind for millennia. From a seed and soil came a world with its own rules and rhythms, those of bud break and harvest, of fermentation and bottle ageing. As those who dedicate their lives to winemaking will tell you, it’s a world which alters one’s very conception of time – a sentiment felt most keenly at multigenerational, family-owned wineries, where simply drawing up a planting rotation plan presumes the accord of yetunborn progeny. For Murray Barlow, whose family owns South Africa’s legendary Rustenberg estate, founded in 1682, viticulture is a lesson in humility, in which a winemaker’s lifetime is but one small cycle within larger ones. “In wine, nothing is finite,” he muses. “I’m not going to hand this estate over to the next generation at the end of my career and say, ‘OK, the work is done.’ Winemaking is a cycle, and it just keeps turning.”

But since the turn of the 21st century, it seems that cycle has quickened. “Wine is changing today because our cultures, our societies have changed so enormously,” says the globetrotting sommelier Enrico Bernardo, 2004 Best Sommelier of the World. “The exchange of information has accelerated, and people everywhere have become far more connected. In the wine world, young winemakers are studying in countries around the globe for the first time and bringing new ideas home; knowledge is being shared in much more transversal, horizontal ways today compared to even 20 years ago when it was far more father-to-son.” For the next generation, it’s a new paradigm which has seen successions at great estates playing out in exciting new ways, with both respect and revamping, continuity and clashes. “The world is evolving very quickly,” says Aly Wente O’Neal, a fifthgeneration winemaker at California’s Wente Vineyards, the oldest family-owned winery in the United States. “Our challenge is, how are we going to take this historic legacy we have of 140 years of winemaking and continue to appeal to new generations moving forward?”

Guillaume Selosse, who in 2018 became the third generation to head Domaine Jacques Selosse, knows about shouldering a great legacy in an era of great change. Starting in 1974, his father Anselme transformed the family estate into the most influential, iconoclastic name in Champagne, as the first to bring Burgundy terroir philosophy and winemaking techniques to the region. “His neighbours took him for a madman because his methods were revolutionary, but still it was a gentler era, there was no social media and it was easier to be entirely focused on nature and the vineyard,” says Guillaume. “Today, it’s almost oppressive how accessible and solicited we are as winemakers –WhatsApp, text messages, email, Instagram …”

But Selosse admits hyperconnectivity is part of his work today, as he regularly exchanges and travels with a network of wine professionals he befriended during his oenology studies in Bordeaux. “Unlike my father, who is very solitary and often happiest deep in his books, I read a bit less, but I’m much more surrounded by friends in wine,” he says. “My passion is visiting wineries around the world. Whenever I come home my head is buzzing with ideas for experiments.” Indulging those passions also prepared him for the handover, having backpacked across Australia for a year and, since 2012, creating new champagnes under a separate label, Guillaume S.

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.