Infusion Against Extraction

In 1985 a serious red Burgundy was expected to be dark. Depth of colour was read as depth of everything else, and the techniques for getting it were well understood: punch the cap down several times a day, pump the juice over it, keep the ferment warm, extend the maceration. Cellars that did this scored well and sold well, and the wines were praised for concentration.

Thirty years later the best addresses on the Côte de Nuits are making wine that is noticeably paler, and a pale young red from a top domaine is now read as a stylistic signal rather than as a fault. That is as complete a reversal as modern winemaking has produced, and it is worth understanding why it happened, because the answer is not simply that taste changed.

The mechanics first. A fermenting red forms a cap: a thick raft of skins pushed to the surface by carbon dioxide. Everything you want from the skins, and everything you do not, comes out of that cap, and how much comes out depends on how hard you work it. Pigeage, punching the cap down into the juice, is the traditional method and was originally done by foot. Remontage, pumping juice from the bottom of the vat over the top, is the efficient one, and it extracts harder because the pump and the splash do more violence and introduce oxygen.

Infusion is the name now given to the other end of the range: a long, cool maceration, barely worked, taking what comes out on its own. The metaphor is tea and it is a good one. You can always take more out of the skins. You cannot put delicacy back once it has been extracted over, which is why the phrase is repeated in so many cellars along the Côte.

Now the reason for the swing, which is more interesting than a change of fashion. Through the 1980s wine was increasingly judged in comparative tastings of young bottles, and scores from those tastings set prices. A line-up rewards impact (colour, concentration, sweetness of fruit) and it does so at six months old. Cellars responded rationally to the incentive they were given. The wines then aged into something dry and hard, which took a decade to become obvious and another decade to become undeniable.

The domaines that reversed first were mostly those whose customers kept the bottles rather than rating them. That is a useful general observation about how quality standards drift: the judging format shapes the product, and a format that judges young wine will select for what shows young, whatever anybody's stated intentions are.

Pinot noir also happens to be a thin-skinned grape with modest colour to give. A pinot that looks like claret has usually been made to look like claret, and the work required to get it there is the same work that strips out the aromatic detail that makes the grape worth planting. There is a reasonable argument that the extracted style was always fighting the variety.

None of which makes gentle handling a recipe. Extraction has to answer to what arrived: heat thickens skins and raises the concentration of everything in them, so a routine that was correct in a cool vintage takes far too much in a hot one. A grower who reduces punch-downs from twice daily to once every second day in a scorching year is not being fashionable; they are reading the fruit. A cellar running the same regime every vintage is not being traditional either. It is not paying attention.