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The football worldcup is on and the weather here is great - it's time for a small homage to an almost lost art of growing wine.

What is a true field blend (Gemischter Satz called in German)?
It's basically a type of vineyard with not just only one variety planted. Many different grapes are planted mixed and harvested and vinified together. If it's a perfect site and the vigneron wants it in a kind of high quality way, he can archieve wines with great harmony, complexity, and a very true taste of its origin, because of no domination by one single grape variety. Oliver de Serres, the minister of Henry the IV said 500 years ago: "Thanks to diversity, it brings us harvest every year!". And this is what it's all about.

Marcel Deiss is a vigneron in Alsace, France, who has planted his best vineyards in the traditional field blend style. Some say his kind of work is too radical, but I say it's not, it's just the traditional way of growing grapes and he has noticed and established that again. He labels these wines just by their origin (great!). The wine world today "thinks" more in a kind of single varietal style wines as thinking just about the origin. That's a pity. The glory of a lot of famous old world wine regions was found by talking just about the origin, not about the variety. This is (sadly) now in some way hidden in the background.
To make a good field blend, high quality grape varieties have to be planted. Anything else will make just an easy wine.

Best example Vienna: the only city in the world with significant wine growing areas which woke up from a "big sleep". The vignerons there kept vineyards which were rooted out the last 30 years everywhere in Austria - the field blends. Those wines can be complex and very true to terroir. Especially on the Nussberg or Bisamberg, which are famous sites in Vienna. The historicly well known austrian wines "Nussberger" and "Gumpoldskirchner" were all field blends. And its good to see that the glory is rising up again. I think there are several reasons why field blends stayed on Vienna's hillsides. The so called "heuriger" wine ("this years wine") is very popular in Heurigen restaurants (nearly the same as a Buschenschank - twitter me if you want to know what a Buschenschank is). It's made out of several varieties but never had high but constant quality. Mostly grown as a field blend was this type of wine very important for the vignerons. I think another reason is the little bit laid-back mentaliy of Vienna's people. Because of this there was no impulse to root out the old vineyards and plant them with just one modern variety. Lucky them!

And what about Styria (Steiermark), my home state:
The "Altsteirischer Mischsatz" a typical field blend wine here got lost, because all of those vineyards (sure, not all brought high quality) were replanted with fashionable varieties like Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Sad, because the actual hype of going back to the roots in wine growing, this includes local grape varieties and wine styles like Gemischter Satz is not what Styria can serve for wine lovers today. (Except Schilcher a rose wine from the Wildbacher grape). A lot of vignerons know it, but nobody talks about this.

Climate change and field blends? If experts have right, extrem weather situations will increase. Field blends bring balance to extrem weather situations like heat, dryness, massive rainfall or cold weather. Less stress but more harmony and more terroir in the wine. What you want more? This is the future.

Links:
Artikel An article from Christian Schiller about field blends (lucky you - it's in English!)
Six-to-nine blog of Peter Vechiatto (German only)

(picture: the famous Rosengartl field blend vineyard in Vienna and now grown on my site Buchertberg as well)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at %I:%M %p and is filed under Discussion, Climate, Weather, Wine, Vineyard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.