Wine & Spirits - April 2018 - 53

"Henri Jayer told me in 2003, 'If I were you, I wouldn't
do any punching down.' Even though the grapes were
mature, the seeds were still green, and you would have
green tannins. He said, 'If the wine is not good from the
vat, it will never be good.'" -Louis Michel Liger-Belair

etrate. He is hoping to find the right balance between
altérite and clay to produce the kind of wine that
Liger-Belair ("more clay-stony") or Tarlov ("more
silt-stony") prefer. Since the cations bonded to the
clay help the roots feed on the soil, he explained, he
wants to find enough clay to encourage the plants
to eat, but not so much that the plants get lazy and
their fruit gets sweet and fat. Where there is a little
clay on the surface of deteriorating rock, it supports
the transfer of mineral compounds from the soil to
the roots and eventually to the fruit, providing the
basic structure in the wine both Tarlov and LigerBelair want.
The clay, Parra told me, makes the difference
between rustic minerality-pointing to Ribeira Sacra
in Spain as an example of vines rooted directly into
rock-and elegant minerality, which he now believes
he can find in the volcanic soils of Oregon.
I spent a day with Parra hunting for altérite, the dissolving rock. He was standing in a soil pit halfway up the
hillside at Witness Tree, tapping the edges of the pit
with the claw of his hammer. He pulled out a tiny
nest of roots, as thin as a hair net, holding a pouch of
black soil that was once a rock. "Gold!" he shouted,
smiling at Ramirez and Tarlov.
While Parra was chipping away, Tarlov was standing at ground level, explaining the work of another
member of the team, Jean-François Hamel, a biochemical engineer who runs a lab at MIT and focuses
much of his attention on microbial life. Tarlov had
tapped into Hamel's team and their expertise in the
single-cell world of yeasts to create a feedback loop,
helping not only to explain some of the observations
Liger-Belair and Parra were making, but also to guide
some of their decisions moving forward.
He asked Hamel to study the diversity in the
microbial populations on the grapes at several different vineyard sites, creating census data; the lab
also analyzed flavor and aroma molecules in the
grapes, and later in the wine. Tarlov said they found
just under 600 compounds in the grapes, and around
1,000 after fermentation. "So, forty percent of the
flavor and aroma comes from the metabolic action
of the yeasts," Tarlov asserted.
He then tied this back to the soil and to Hamel's
work on microbial populations. "Not only does the
water-holding capacity of the soil affect stress on
vines," he said, "it completely changes the microbial
population. And we know yeasts chemically change

the flavor compounds." As Tarlov explained, "We're
using a lot of science to jump six or eight hundred
years of trial and error. We don't have monks. We
use technology."
The wines, however, do not taste technical, but
they do taste precise.
A few months later, Liger-Belair came to New York
to present the 2016s. Originally, the cuvées at Chapter 24 riffed on flood soils and volcanic soils, with
The Last Chapter a top blend of the two. In 2016,
the team harvested based on the patterns of lava flow
and the alteration of the soil, as detailed by Parra.
Then Ramirez and Tarlov spent several days tending
to the fermentations, feeding oxygen to the yeasts
through carefully timed pump-overs. It was another
bit of advice from Hamel, explicating the winemaking strategies Liger-Belair had brought to the team.
Liger-Belair told me that when he asked Henri Jayer
for advice on how to handle the heat of the 2003
harvest, Jayer suggested he be extremely gentle with
extraction. The fact that the ripe grapes gave him
lower finished alcohols than he expected caught his
interest, and he fine-tuned his strategy over time. Tarlov had raised the matter with Hamel and his team
at MIT, to study the science behind the seeming contradiction (that riper grapes might produce lowerthan-expected alcohol levels) and learned that it was
due to the way different populations of yeasts consume oxygen, and what byproducts they produce. He
also learned that if they could prolong the fermentations, feeding oxygen to the successive populations of
yeasts that develop in the must, the aroma and flavor
compounds in the wines would further proliferate
while the alcohol levels remained relatively low. It's
the microbial life in the soil, impacting the growth of
the vine and the microbial life on the fruit brought
into the winery, where it interacts with yeasts already
resident, all creating a matrix of scents and flavors
amplified by Liger-Belair's fermentation technique.
Precise and formidably detailed, the 2016 wines
from Chapter 24 are a jump shift from anything
the team has produced up until now. The team has
chosen to name the wines in parallel to the Burgundy convention of villages (collections of vineyards within a small area), rather than the Oregon
convention of naming the grower. Liger-Belair says
they may name the sites when they are part of their
own estate. It's an interesting approach, as the wines
present their diverse flavors and textures with subtlety and elegance. But there is something to be said

Mark Tarlov, proprietor of
Chapter 24, has organized
one of the most high-powered
winegrowing teams working in
the New World today.

WINE & SPIRITS

APRIL 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - April 2018