On Fatigue (Michel Guignier’s “Mélodie d’Automne” 2018)
I haven’t been drinking much wine this summer. Is that true? Against the longstanding backdrop of rabid, enthusiastic tasting as a “wine professional,” it is. While I’ve had some long nights and a few turbid mornings this season, I’ve slowed, mostly returning to standbys and seeking stability in familiar bottles. The shift from summer to fall has prompted me to look harder at this —both the fatigue and my response to it— and the way it dovetails with the urgency and, again, fatigue of fire season and a myriad of other inflammations after eighteen months of Pandemia. On a recent trip to the Bay, conversations with winemakers ahead of harvest were peppered with concerns about things like evacuations and smoke taint[1] — a now-familiar Autumn Song.
This exhaustion has found its way into other conversations too. Namely, the cynical laments of what’s likely a small but vocal cadre of wine people online whose loudest clarion call is for other wine people to shut up about additions of sulphur. While I have my opinions about dosing wines with SO2, especially in the case of the otherwise well-farmed and well-made, the discourse is now mostly relegated to memes and is, frankly, depressing, particularly in the context of the many more important factors in a wine’s impact on its drinker, maker and our climate. I’d say it’s as simple as logging off, but unfortunately the jokes continue and the punchlines have gotten tired.
Are these things related? I thought about it while drinking, what else, an old standby: “Mélodie d’Automne,” a 2018 gamay from Beaujolais’s Michel Guignier. His is another region that’s badly feeling the pinch of climate change. From a shortage of rainfall to rising temperatures, winemakers are dealing with significant pressures on their work and its fruits. This “Mélodie,” along with most of Guignier’s cuveés in recent vintages, crept well above the average alcohol percentage of years past, at a whopping 13.5%. This has become pretty standard, along with a marked overall shift in gamay’s behavior in the area, to the point that some people have declared 2015 the year of the Last Good Beaujolais. Actually though, or at least in my mind, it’s a matter of kissing unrealistic, ungenerous expectations good-bye and truly listening to the wines.
A winemaker staunchly in the zero-zero camp, Michel Guignier doesn’t add sulfur, relying instead on the impeccable farming of his five hectares, a biodiverse domaine surrounded by dense forest, which itself is surrounded by the thicket of monoculture that tends to dominate Beaujolais. At the same time that they are arguably radical, the wines are direct, made simply and carefully. All gamay, each bottling distinguished by its site and maceration time, along with a depth, stability and soulfulness that could compel even conservative drinkers.
“Mélodie d’Automne'' is one of his lightest expressions (though that means less each year with each additional half-percentage point of alcohol) whose name is a reference, I assume, to one of the French language’s better-known poems, “Chanson d'automne,” or “Autumn Song,” written in the 1800s by Paul Verlaine. The poem is a melancholy one, a dirge on passing hours, falling leaves, and looking back on old days with a tear in one’s eye. Melody is distinct from song however and, unlike the poem, I read this bottling in bittersweet harmony; a winemaker’s ability to adapt and make space for a new iteration of his fruit’s tune. While wine is not a panacea for political fatigue, or cynicism, or climate change, “Mélodie d'Automne” is both a clear-throated reminder of the latter and a salve for all three.
[1] Or, in some cases, acceptance; smoke taint as, both sardonically and not, a new, grim expression of terroir.