RIVERS OF WINE
Water and wine.
Take a gander at the globe’s vineyards and you’ll note that many of them—certainly, a good passel of the higher quality ones—are located along riversides. Water courses through wine the world over: in Europe alone, the rivers Moselle, Rhine, Loire, Rhone, Danube, Duero and the great estuary of the Gironde are veins through that continent’s prestige vineyards. In the New World, we’ve got the Russian, Margaret, Napa, Murray and Columbia, to name but a few.
In truth, rivers are key to the success of many wines, because grapes often grow better there than elsewhere. Better grapes make better wine.
Some of the world’s great vineyards would not even exist were it not for their rivers.
For example, when the Romans, millennia ago, vanquished their way through southern France, they deforested the shorelines of the rivers that they used for transportation and they planted vines in the stead of trees. It wasn’t because they wanted more wine for drinking. Trees and forests could hide enemy tribes; much shorter vines could not. Wine as strategy—a first.
For us today, rivers give to wine much more than safe travels. Above all, rivers have carved hillsides on which vines grow. Hills are among the more important influences on the quality of wine grapes.
Centuries ago, the Roman historian Livy wrote, “Bacchus amat colles”—“Bacchus loves hills” —attesting to the importance of hills to good wine.
Above all, what makes hillside vineyards so beneficial for growing wine grapes is stress. Like human beings put to the test, vines that undergo stress generally turn out grapes that are superior to vines that have it easy (those on valley floors, for instance).
Hillsides stress vines in one very important way: soils there tend to be poorer, and water, scarcer, so vines must reach deep to find nutrients and sustenance. When vines spend energy doing that, they allocate less to the production of grapes, so yields are lower. Low yields mean that grapes arrive at the winery with greater concentrations of flavor and color. That alone makes for better wine.
Hillside vineyards also have inherent benefits for grape growing. For example, sunlight hits hills at a full-on angle, in the face as it were. Combine direct sunlight with hillside’s cooler temperatures (a function of both higher altitude and downward air flow) and grapes have a longer, more temperate growing season—perfect for long, full maturation of flavor, color and aroma, hence in wine.
On the negative side, hillside vineyards are more difficult to farm than valley floor vineyards. Some, such as those along the Moselle, need to be worked completely by hand and on foot, for example, and that can result in more expensive wines than those from flat land vineyards.