Whole Cluster

A bunch of grapes arrives at the winery. Before it goes into the vat, someone decides whether to strip the berries off the woody stalk they grew on. That decision (whole cluster or destemmed, and in what proportion) is the single most consequential stylistic choice in red Burgundy, and the one that most reliably divides serious producers who agree about everything else.

Stems are not neutral. They contribute their own tannins, chemically different from the tannins in grape skins and perceptually firmer and more savoury. They contribute aromatic compounds often described as floral, peppery or tea-like. They absorb a small amount of alcohol and colour, which is why whole-cluster wines can look paler than their concentration suggests. And they do something purely physical: a vat packed with whole bunches has channels running through it, which lets juice move, moderates fermentation temperature, and makes the whole mass behave differently from a slurry of loose berries.

Against all of which stands one risk, and it is the entire argument. Stem ripeness lags berry ripeness. A stem that has lignified, turned brown and woody by harvest, gives spice and structure. A stem that is still green gives bitterness, hardness and a smell of cut grass that no amount of cellar work removes. In a cool year, or on a site that ripens late, the berries can be perfectly ready while the stems are not.

That is why the practice has a history rather than a settled answer. Whole-cluster fermentation was normal in Burgundy for centuries, because destemming by hand is miserable work and nobody did it unless they had to. In the second half of the twentieth century two things combined against it: reliable destemming machines made removal easy, and a run of cool decades made green stems common. Henri Jayer, the most influential Burgundian winemaker of the modern era, destemmed completely and argued for it forcefully, and a generation followed him. By the 1990s destemming was close to orthodoxy.

Then it reversed, for two reasons pulling the same way. Climate warming made lignified stems normal rather than lucky. And a generation reacting against the dense, extracted, late-picked, heavily oaked style of the 1990s wanted freshness and grip from somewhere other than punching down harder, and stems supply exactly that, structure without extraction. The result is that a wine's whole-cluster percentage is now a routine question at any serious tasting, and answers of twenty, fifty or a hundred per cent are all defensible positions held by people who know what they are doing.

What should a drinker do with this? Mostly, notice it. The signature to look for is a cluster of traits appearing together: aromatic lift, a peppery or floral top note, a firm savoury finish, and colour lighter than the weight on the palate would predict. When those arrive together, whole cluster is a reasonable guess: a guess rather than a diagnosis, since old vines, cool sites and gentle extraction can push in the same direction.

And then decide whether you like it, which is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one. Whole cluster adds complexity and takes away immediacy. Some of the most admired wines in Burgundy use a great deal of it and some of the most admired use none. This is one of the places where the region's insistence that everything comes from the ground quietly breaks down, because two growers with adjoining rows can make wines that differ more from each other than either differs from the next village.