Fulvio Bressan - Taking the long-term view

"Better that you have wine in your heart and soul, or you change business."  Fulvio Bressan, June 2012

Winemaking has developed significantly in the last few decades. Winemakers now routinely draw on a vast canon of research, learning and technology to help ensure that they produce consistent wines and harvest fruit in prime condition, year in, year out. Vintage variation, of the sort that wrote off most early 90's Bordeaux, is almost a thing of the past. Modern viticulture (growing the grapes) tends to focus on getting a good return-on-investment, a defined yield (which could be high or low depending on the ambitions of the winemaker), and physiological ripeness - in other words, the point where every component of the grape, from tannins, to pips, skins and flesh, is ripe and not green or bitter tasting. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing though - our supermarkets and wine merchants have shelves lined with fault-free wines, but there is ever-increasing homogenity, with "corre…