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Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 16:23 Sun 08 Feb 2015
by jdaw1
Andy Velebil has commented on the ‘recent’ spread of block planting.
Do we know of recent instances of vineyards re-planted as field blends? And were those field blends just the fashionable five, or were they old-style proper field blends of many many varieties?
Re: Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 17:38 Sun 08 Feb 2015
by Andy Velebil
jdaw1 wrote:Andy Velebil has commented on the ‘recent’ spread of block planting.
Do we know of recent instances of vineyards re-planted as field blends? And were those field blends just the fashionable five, or were they old-style proper field blends of many many varieties?
My understanding is
some producers are going back to sort-of field blends. That is, instead of tossing whatever they had on hand they are doing mixed micro-blocks of several known grapes varieties. By back to I don't mean wholesale ripping out and replanting everything. Basically, instead of making everything true block planting and true old-style field blends they've come up with a hybrid of the two.
Re: Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 17:49 Sun 08 Feb 2015
by jdaw1
Andy Velebil wrote:some producers
Are there any names that may be revealed?
Re: Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 17:50 Sun 08 Feb 2015
by Andy Velebil
Not my place to do so, sorry.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Re: Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 18:14 Sun 08 Feb 2015
by jdaw1
Found one.
SaltAndPepperPots wrote:Pintas, like many vineyards in Portugal, is a field blend which means even its winemakers cannot be sure of the precise blend of grapes in the final wine. Sandra said this is what she believes makes the region so unique. So confident are the couple in the centuries old method that while many new plantations are being planted by single variety, Sandra and Jorge are set to replant a field blend at their nearby Quinta da Manoella.
Edit: and another.
Imbibe.com wrote: But concerns are growing that, in this brave new world of regulated, clonally selected Touriga Nacional, this elusive Douro character may be lost. The answer? Throw out the rule book and mimic the past by replanting mixed vineyards.
‘We are doing that,’ confirms Tiago Alves de Sousa. ‘We are doing single plantings, but mixed ones also, because we want to see which method will lead to the best wines. It’s all about experimenting… Honestly, it’s an organised style of chaos, but then again, it was always organised chaos in the past as well.’
But that chaos is being refined, in that, of the dozens of varieties found in the old Gaivosa vineyards, 20-30 are not going to be replanted. Of the others, cuttings are taken from the oldest and best vines in the estate and then replanted in a ‘recreated’ field blend experiment of about 0.5ha. But will this include a proportion of Touriga Nacional grapes? ‘The acidity is lovely, but I think we have enough already,’ says Tiago Alves de Sousa.
Vineyards recently re-planted as field blends
Posted: 00:56 Mon 09 Feb 2015
by djewesbury
I'm interested in the Alves de Sousa experiment. If 20-30 varieties are being discarded (perhaps there were four dozen or so in the original), then this is still a homogenising move, albeit with some mitigation. Presumably those 20-30 are the weaker, less reliable, less disease resistant. But wasn't the point of the field blend that the weaker varieties were encouraged to greater heights by their proximity with all the others? And that it all balanced out in the tonel, and then in the bottle? I am not convinced that the science of the field blend has ever really been understood; and don't know that these experiments with modified blends are really that close an approximation.