The Corker

You’d be well advised to try some of the garagistes’ small-scale, top-quality wines.

Meet an odd couple: the two words ‘garage’ and ‘wine’. They seem to have as much in common as ‘battlefield’ and ‘lace’, say, or ‘nightclub’ and ‘hymnal’. At best, garage wine might signify, like garage flowers, a solecism committed in the name of desperation: sorry, Tony and Ethel, but all we could find to bring to your Golden Wedding celebrations was this bottle of heavily advertised Californian wine carefully selected by Esso. But we love you very much, honestly.

Wait, though. Announce to your wine-savviest friend that you are bringing a bottle of garage wine to his long-planned birthday dinner party, and a look of foxy intrigue will cross his face. All is not what it seems. This has nothing to do with forecourts, petrol pumps or wilting chrysanthemums. Said friend will know that you have a generous nature, you’re on the inside track for wine and that there are limits to your reverence for tradition.

It all began with a man called Jean-Luc Thunevin. This former forestry worker, disc jockey, bank clerk and restaurateur had fetched up as a successful wine merchant in Bordeaux’s prettiest town, St Emilion, selling bottles with grand labels from the local vineyards. He and his consort Murielle would take constitutionals after lunch (she is a superb cook) through those same vineyards. They would observe that Monsieur X was a lazy wine-grower and mucked things up in the cellar, but that his wine would sell at a high price nonetheless – because of its grand label and its haughty historical resonances.

So Jean-Luc and Murielle decided to turn the process on its head. Why not buy a vineyard without a grand label, one that history had never rated, but treat it as if it were a rose garden and the wine like essential oil? Zero reputation; total quality. There’d be a market for that, surely, amid so much expensive laurel-resting?

In 1989, the couple bought a few modest parcels of vines and, in 1991, a former garage in the back streets of St Emilion which became an ad hoc winery. Garage wine was born. It was named after Murielle, whose maiden name was Andraud – Château Valandraud.

The true garagiste has no other possibilities because he has no big vineyards

“The true garagiste,” Thunevin tells me, “is someone who has no other possibilities because he has no money, no big vineyards. He just has to do the best he can because he has to live off the sale of 3,000 bottles. For me, that’s a garagiste; that’s the pure spirit of the garage.” How, though, do you create a market if you have no reputation? Answer: you make sure critics taste your wine. And one in particular: Robert Parker. Parker’s scores make the market in fine Bordeaux, and Parker loves to back plucky, try-harder little guys. In 1995, Valandraud got a better initial score from Robert Parker than the legendary Château Pétrus. Thunevin’s fortunes improved – but the garage game changed.

“To begin with,” continues Thunevin, “the garagistes were people like me who, without any money, managed to have an amazing success with their wines. Then, well-known properties began to make those kind of wines too. And now there’s a third category, of people who simply want to jump on the bandwagon.”

Financial success always spawns imitation. To say that there has been a garage goldrush is an exaggeration, but not by much. Bordeaux over the past ten years has been peppered with hopeful wines with brand new names; small-scale but ambitious wine-growers as far afield as South Africa and Australia now describe themselves, proudly, as ‘garage winemakers’. I regularly used to meet cheerful Peter Sisseck of Pingus in Spain and arty Andrea Franchetti of Tenuta di Trinoro in Italy at Valandraud; each now produces, from a recent standing start, some of the most expensive bottles of their respective nations.

So what should we make of it all? “The recipe,” Thunevin explains to me, “isn’t very complicated.” Halve the normal yield; tackle problems in the vineyard by physical labour rather than chemicals; pluck and arrange the leaves on the vines meticulously to make each one a high-performance ripening machine; take whatever risks are necessary with the weather to get the grapes fully ripe; pick and sort the grapes carefully; use wild yeasts, spotless wooden vats and new wooden barrels in the cellar. Given land and labour costs, no wine made in this way in leading wine-growing regions of Europe is ever likely to cost less than £20 a bottle. Which would be fair enough, but don’t they all taste the same?

As long as the wines reflect their origins and are attractive, no drinker need fear the garage

This is the main criticism levelled against the garagistes. There is, it’s true, always a certain density and concentration about wines made in this way: the low yields alone account for that. Yet these very qualities used once to be the hallmark of fine wines in good or great vintages. What’s wrong with that? As long as the spectrum of flavours hasn’t become homogenised, as long as the wines reflect their origins truthfully and as long as they are attractive to drink at all times, no drinker need fear the garage. The things that make all wines taste the same are the use of machines and chemicals in overproductive vineyards, and selected yeasts and more chemicals in the winery. Thunevin’s recipe is, in truth, no more than a set of abbreviated yet eternal instructions about how to make good red wine.

Yes, your suspicions are correct: I am a garageophile. Does this mean that I never spend less than £20 on a bottle of wine? It does not. My garageophilia means that I applaud any efforts of this sort, either partial or total, and in any country of the world, including those where labour costs and land costs are much lower than in Europe. I like wines of density and concentration; I loathe wines that underdeliver, that are skimpy or slender or hollow, even if they have the grandest labels on them. The garage superstars like Valandraud have created a trickle-down effect around the world. That effect is beneficial, since it communicates one message above all: effort matters more than reputation.