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Regenerative farming

Tuesday, 22 November 2022 by Derek Mossman Knapp

Some of you have asked what do you do on the vineyards where you do not till?  

The simple answer is to cut the vetch growing between the rows with a flail mower (mulches little bits so organic material is reincorporated into the earth) See the pictures here with this Cariñena in Bagual—old Calivoro. Depending upon the year this green almost flowers 2-3 times and each time pass with the mower insuring the nitrogen stays in the soil so it can be utilized by the vines later on. 

The “the tough part” is right around the plants. The second photo-video shows how we keep the vegetation from bothering the vines. We simply break the stocks with our feet or with small planks of wood. It can be cut but the best method is stomping to bend stems plant by plant so their nitrogen stays in the ground and they continue to lend shade to the earth after they dry up in an orderly fashion. When the stocks create shade for the earth around and between the vines we have less moisture evaporating from the vineyard. Eventually this plant matter will break down into the soil but not near as fast as the bits we have mulched. This is Pilar’s favourite part.  

@agricolabagual @efecto_manada @savoryinstitue   

Stomping credit : Laura from Guadalajara  
 

Stomping credit : Laura from Guadalajara 

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The Old Vine Conference

Wednesday, 06 July 2022 by Derek Mossman Knapp

Derek Mossmann Knapp – Garage Wine Co.

Derek Mossman Knapp, co-founder of Garage Wine Co. (image credit: Matt Wilson)

Maule & Itata, Chile

Garage Wine Co. began quite literally in Pilar Miranda and Derek Mossman Knapp’s Garage. Today Garage Wine Co. makes wines from small parcels of individual vineyard sites, working in conjunction with local growers.

Focusing on dry irrigated old vines, they produce dry-farmed field-blends of Carignan, Garnacha, Monastrell, País, Cinsault and Cabernet Franc grown on pre-phylloxera rootstock with small farmers in the Maule and Itata.

The vineyards are on the old Coastal Range of mountains closer to the Pacific — Chile’s other mountains. These are older and cooled more slowly so they have granitic soils, many with intrusions and cracks for roots to get deep down into.

Utilising regenerative farming techniques, they cultivate these vineyards with the local community, who work with horse and plough as local families have done for generations.

“In these times it is important to stand for what you believe in, and more importantly to build the kind of business you believe in. At Garage Wine Co. we revive old vineyards in marginalised Chilean communities to make coveted wines.”

Derek Mossman Knapp

More at: https://www.oldvines.org

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Jancis Robinson – 2021 WRITING COMPETITION

Friday, 14 January 2022 by Derek Mossman Knapp
From Jancisrobinson.com Purple Pages 2021 Writing Competition [Old Vines] : 
Elona Hesseling didn’t tell us anything about herself when she sent in her entry to our wine writing competition, so I had to go digging. Google delivered. According to the Bibendum website, ‘Born into the world of wine, Elona grew up on a wine farm in South Africa. After graduating from the University of Stellenbosch with a degree in Viticulture and Oenology, she completed a couple of harvests before joining South Africa’s producer-focused magazine WineLand as journalist. A move to London meant a new adventure and Elona joined Bibendum’s marketing team to head up brand communications.’ See our WWC21 guide for more old-vine competition entries. 

The heart and soul of the Truquilemu vineyard

“Just imagine such old vineyards, passed down over almost 20 generations, today suffering from neglect. Not because they stopped making wonderful wine, but because the vineyards simply don’t interface with the modern world.” So explains Derek Mossmann-Knapp during our most recent conversation about their ventures in Chile’s Secano Interior.

WWC21 Hesseling E - Derek Mossmann-Knapp

Derek Mossmann-Knapp

Those who have had the pleasure to meet Derek will know that he is one of the most passionate (and I don’t use this word lightly) and exuberant proponents for protecting old vines and supporting local communities. Through their Garage Wine Co., Derek and his winemaker wife, Pilar Miranda, focus on reviving old vineyards in marginalised Chilean communities to make award-winning, individual, and often limited bottling wines.

One such vineyard – and there are many to choose from – is in the Maule Valley. Truquilemu is, according to Derek, perhaps in the freshest corner of the Maule, located high on the Coastal Range of mountains where reds only just manage to ripen. While it is officially 75 years old, with documentation stating it was planted in the 1940s, local opinion is that this was when the vineyard was first registered with authorities, not when it was planted, and that it is in fact much older. Derek explains, “There are men of 80 years old who worked on the farm as teenagers, who tell us it was old and gnarly when they began working in the vineyard.”

Covering about 4.5ha in total, the vineyard has various owners, most of them cousins. Derek and Pilar rent 2ha of these on a long-term basis, where the next generation had moved to the city, while they also work in a long-term partnership with another grower who owns a further hectare. “When the fundo was broken up in the 60s with agrarian reform, the administrator (of a much larger fundo) ended up with the piece of land that included the vineyards and the smaller of two colonial adobe homes, from where it was subsequently divided up between his heirs,” explains Derek.

These old bush-head vines are a field blend of mostly Carinena, with Monastrell (which the Garage team grafted on Pais roots), Pais, Malbec and Negramoll. “No one knows why so much Carinena (very rare back then) was planted in one place,” says Derek. “Usually, it was dosed out among the Pais to lend more colour, acid and structure to simpler country wines.” Which is exactly what these grapes were used for before Derek and Pilar discovered this piece of land in 2008.

Old vines, ‘old’ hands

Working with these old vines is both a privilege and a challenge, which is where the importance of people come in. Empowering small, marginal communities is part and parcel of Derek and Pilar’s entire philosophy. And it’s a win-win situation. Derek explains, “As wine has boomed in Chile over the last quarter century, it has grown increasingly difficult for these small growers to sell their grapes at a bona fide price. Large buyers want more for less and they would have the small modernise: spray instead of cultivate, scale instead of focus, and most of all, reduce labour costs.

WWC21 Hesseling E - Working the vineyards horse and plough

Working the vineyards horse and plough

“We disagree with this pushing aside of age-old field craft and the wisdom of farming down the ages. We think proper farming is being undermined by speculation and livelihoods are threatened not by ‘market forces’ but by disconnect. Where do the buyers think the flavour comes from anyway?”

For Derek, the ‘flavour’ comes from the wisdom of these ‘old’ hands. “The vignerons here work amongst us to cultivate the vines. They work with horses and plow the land. These vignerons have farmed the Secano for centuries, and not just their vineyards, but mixed farms of heritage seed wheat, free range livestock, and local market gardening.”

But it’s about more than just keeping local people in work. Together with their Swedish importers, Handpicked Wines, Garage have recently launched a project called ‘Revival’. This aims to help keep labourers working safely during the Covid-19 pandemic, by creating what they call a ‘revival bubble’.

And this isn’t the first such project. Following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Chile, Derek went on a mission to seek out old-vine Carinena in Maule. He discovered some amazing, but untamed vines, and worked with these local farmers to improve their vineyards and livelihoods, while using the grapes to make wine under the Garage Wine Co. label.

In January 2017, disaster struck again when the worst wildfires in Chile’s history ravaged the country. Despite acres of land destroyed and the looming impact of smoke taint on ripening grapes, Derek decided to craft something beautiful out of the destruction. And so, on the heels of these fires – and quite literally out of the ashes – he created the first of the Fieldcraft bottlings, called Phoenix. This special, limited bottling white wine is a blend of Pais and Carinena, which was sold in limited quantities to the UK On Trade.

In the glass

But back to the old vines of Truquilemu. The soil is full of crystals and decomposed granite, and being the freshest corner of the Maule, Mediterranean reds only just manage to reach alcohol levels of around 12.7 to 12.8%. “They must have made some pretty terrible, green wines for many years when they were first planted!” he quips.

There are three distinct sections. About a dozen long rows are used for their Old Vine Pale, while the rest is used in the Truquilemu Vineyard (2018 Lot 97) and the Cru Truquilemu. The Old Vine Pale is, as the name suggests, somewhere between a light red and a rosé, and was the perfect solution for a more vigorous section of this vineyard – despite initial objections from Pilar, at a time when they were solely a red wine cellar. Derek also tells the story of how they were convinced to produce this wine more commercially by an unnamed travelling winemaker during a visit some years ago… but that is a story for another day.

Regardless – and thankfully, as it is absolutely delicious – the Old Vine Pale was born. With access to more water, these 12 rows at one end of the Truquilemu vineyard are more vigorous, and the grapes are cut earlier, at about 1.5 to 2kg yield per plant. “After years trying to tame them, we simply made the wine that the vines were screaming to make,” he says.

WWC21 Hesseling E - Carinena, Maule

Ripe old-vine Cariñena grapes

Traditionally (or as Derek puts it, ‘ancestrally’) farmed by hand and horse, the juice is naturally fermented with native yeast, without skins, in two parts. One part of the blend is pressed like a white, while the other is made like a red wine without skins. Aged in older (four years plus) barrels over one winter, they only produce around 3,800 bottles a year.

So, is it rosé or a light red? For Derek, it’s “a proper first glass of a long Chilean lunch.” He says, “This wine is not made for the swilling of summer. We initially released it in the fall, just when the low budget rosés get put away. The 2020 vintage is crisp and austere, made to be imbibed over a few years’ time. We have bottles of the early vintages and perhaps due to the wine’s tremendous acidity (3,0 pH) it not only keeps its freshness, but it develops complexity and pleasantly surprises for years to come.”

All in all, a delicious and unique wine from ruggedly beautiful and gnarly old vines in the heart of the unassuming Maule. Compared to many old vines that sadly get the axe for various reasons, this vineyard is one of the luckier ones. Through its 75+ years of existence it has suffered many a frost and mildew infection, while sections of the Pais and Carinena were neglected and got burned in the wildfires of 2017. But it survived and has been revived. Why, I ask Derek? “Because it makes great wine. Old vines don’t make good wine because they are old, they are old because they make good wine.”

Photo credit: Garage Wine Co.

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Garage Wine Co
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About Garage Wine Co.

Garage Wine began quite literally in Pilar and Derek’s Garage. After half a dozen vintages making wine for an informal market of family and friends, it began exporting to UK & Denmark in 2006

The Parcels

GWCo makes wines from a series of individual parcels, small lots / bottlings of 8 -22 barrels that include a series of dry-farmed field-blends of Carignan, Garnacha, Monastrell, País, Cinsault and Cab Franc grown on pre-phylloxera rootstock with small farmers in the Maule and Itata. Each wine is from a 1-2 hectare parcel in a different place: Bagual, Caliboro, Coelemu, Guarilihue, Loncomilla, Portezuelo, Puico, Ranquil, Sauzal, Truquilemu…

Over the years working in the community we have raised a veritable posse of vineyard hands whose skills are working the vineyards the old way / the traditional way— originario. We cultivate vineyards with small vigneron partners who work with horse and plough as his family has done for generations. Some of the parcels, where the next generation moved to the city, we have opted to rent long-term creating more work for the local hands who do want to stay on the farm.

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The vineyards are on the old Coastal Range of mountains closer to the Pacific — Chile’s other mountains. These are older and cooled more slowly so they have granitic soils, many with intrusions and cracks for roots to get deep down into. When GWCo. speaks of the provenance of our wines however we mean more than just the geology of the terroir. This is a good start, but we are convinced the farming practices that have evolved over generations have as much to do with the wines’ personalities as the soils. The regeneration of the vineyards long since neglected depends upon this farming.

GWCo. also makes an old-vine Cab Franc (old bush head vines) and a Cab Sauv blend in the Maule as well as two Cabs mountain-grown in the Maipo where the firm began in 2003.

All the wines are made by hand with native yeasts in small tanks, punched down manually and pressed out in a small basket press. GWCo is still very much a DIY operation and we still tow much of the crop back to the winery in trailers behind trusty pickup trucks 2,ooo kilos at a time.

Single Ferment Series Wines

Pais & Cinsault in the Secano Interior, the cradle of the original Chilean viticulture, have been forever the victim of commodity pricing. When GWCo saw its Carignan growers being paid paltry sums for their other fruit we began acquiring small bits from various farmers to experiment. From the beginning, we paid bonafide prices that would allow for the traditional field works to cultivate the soil properly to continue into the future. Commercial bottlings of “Single Ferments” began with serendipity when we simply could not resist not one but three small bits of Cinsault. And then promptly plain ran out of tanks to ferment them in. With nowhere to put all three, we simply stacked the second bit of newly harvested fruit on top of the first already fermenting—and then the third on top of both, creating one single fermentation from the fruit of three farms. We adopted the same technique with Pais and subsequently named both wines: Single Ferment Series.

The Nitty Gritty

In these times it is important to stand for what you believe in, and more importantly to build the kind of business you believe in. At Garage Wine Co. we revive old vineyards in marginalized Chilean communities to make coveted wines. We’ve positioned these wines in a dozen established fine wine markets around the world and we grow. The wines are not made to be expensive per se, but they are found on the higher shelves– they need to command a price that allows for proper farming. What we have discovered is that the long-term practices of regenerative farming not only make for better fruit and thus more flavourful wine, but that such a business can become a force for financial, community and environmental good.

The Baby and the Bathwater  

As South American wine exports have boomed over the last quarter-century, it has grown increasingly difficult for small farmers to sell their old-vine grapes at a proper price – a price that can consistently sustain family and community. Mainstream buyers want more for less and they would have the growers modernise. The modern wine business calls for spraying instead of cultivating, scaling instead of focusing, and above all: reducing the cost of labour. But with the old vineyards, the labour is precisely where one finds the wisdom of farming passed down through the ages. Throwing that away would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Regenerative Farming

Farming in the Secano Interior, the Maule and Itata valleys of Southern Chile, has been a way of life since Colonial times. Not just vineyards, but mixed farming of heritage seed wheat, free-range livestock and local market produce. Small-scale farms use dry-farming methods: turning over the earth to capture scarce seasonal rainwater, and nutrients from the clever use of seasonal cover crops that in turn help sequester carbon from the air, and the use of horses to get into rows where tractors can’t reach.

This is where GWCo. works; too far from the comfort zone of those in the mainstream. These vineyards were neglected and relegated to bulk wine for decades because the booming market wanted branded varietals that didn’t command a price to support the work.

For more than a decade GWCo. has worked these old vines, there has been a marked improvement both in vineyard health and quality of the fruit produced.

The marrying of the fieldcraft of these small-scale farmers with the lens of modern science and GWCo’s mindful winemaking took a decade, but the marriage has proven successful not just for GWCo, but also for the farmers, our suppliers and customers alike. Over the past few years, we have begun to rent and in some cases acquire the property underneath the old vines. Today one-third of our production is worked our way with our own people.

Necessity was the mother of sustainability

Sustainability for us was never about seals and certifications. We became sustainable just trying to survive being small in an industry geared to the big. Vintage after vintage we made our way through a series of necessary work-arounds, finding a way forward, that only later would be seen to be sustainable.

Recycled bottles – Because our production runs were small we were challenged when it came to dry-goods. When bottle makers refused to deliver to us, we found a local bottle recycler who became a trusted partner. This small business employs workers in a rural part of the country where stable and safe work is hard to find. What we learned is that when bottles are manufactured they have a limited shelf-life on the factory patio—a best before date if you will. Today we buy these bottles and wash them before use. This is glass that would otherwise have been smashed and melted and remade—without ever having been used. What is the carbon footprint of a bottle manufactured twice to be used once?

Labels & Packaging— We learned to paint / silk-screen bottles because our bottlings were so small that the label printers did not want to work with us. The industry was geared to long print runs and said there was no money in printing 1200 labels. So we built a custom machine and found experienced hands with silk-screening. Luis, our bottle painter, has been painting bottles for us for 11 years now. (Chile’s first hotel built entirely of recycled materials: The WineBox, has adapted out bottles for their lamps today.)

What’s with the wax? - Regular capsules were also sold with a minimum far larger than our needs, so we found a school supply firm that would make us food-safe wax for seals from crayon wax.

All of these workarounds-- bothers slash hassles at the time, led to a positive and durable differentiation in packaging. We have continued to work with earth-friendly inks for silk screening and recycled materials for cases.

Fermentation tanks: Unable to buy new tanks— designed to make mainstream wines, large, expensive and inflexible in their design, we took the leftover cuttings and scraps of a large stainless manufacturer and pieced together Lagars (traditional word for open tanks). We did it for far less money and the upcycling created opportunities for local welding shops.

Fruit: Years ago we bought from mainstream growers. When we made a crackerjack wine, the grower would use the prestige with critics to sell our fruit to someone bigger / better known leaving us without said fruit and without continuity in our portfolio. After two or three experiences such as this, frustrated, we went South to the Secano to work with growers unknown, unpolished, and disconnected from the mainstream. Working closely with small growers far from the beaten path, we found diamonds in the rough. When the polishing was done we had forged a bond with the growers—partnerships that we have continued to build upon with others in the neighbourhood.

Diverse leadership

Let’s face it, the wine business can be conservative, clubby and patriarchic. Having a female lead our work helps us work with our growers and suppliers on a different footing. We also like to mix scientists with field hands. Instead of contracting the cheapest bused-in labour, we keep it local where there are more experienced hands. Mercenary piecework doesn’t work — proper sourcing does. It’s a mouthful, but in a phrase: the difference created by the discretionary effort released when you work in good faith with local farmhands is so much more than the savings that might be achieved from cost-cutting, that there’s no comparing the two. We have never looked back.

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