Vinceremos Organic Wine Blog

Botrytis Cinerea or Noble Rot
Whether these words are familiar to you or not, if you’re a fan of sweet wine you are likely to have encountered this sometimes magical fungus which affects grapes in certain conditions. If a vineyard gets misty and damp in the early part of the day followed by a warm, sunny afternoon conditions are ideal for Botrytis to attack the grapes. Berries become mouldy and shrivelled to a point where they look most unappealing – the crucial part of this is that the skin does not split so the juices inside become highly concentrated. These mouldy grapes are harvested and fermented in a similar way to normal wine, but the result should be an ultra rich and luscious sweet wine with a full-bodied marmalade character. The flavour is unmistakeable and the world’s greatest sweet wines, such as Chateau d’Yquem from Bordeaux and Tokaji from Hungary, all have Botrytis at the core of their wines.

These wines can be very expensive, particularly top class Trockenbeerenauslese from Germany (literally translated as ‘best selection of dried berries’), where individual grapes are chosen rather than whole bunches or vines. Yields are much smaller than normal – think of a glass of wine per vine (sometimes less) as opposed to a whole bottle. It’s worth noting that in some years in Bordeaux’s Sauternes region the conditions don’t appear and wine lovers write off certain vintages as ‘having no Botrytis that year’. In places such as California if conditions aren’t right a machine that produces misty steam will be pumped through the vineyard in the morning to make sure they get their Botrytis. That’s not allowed in Sauternes of course – French wine law forbids it. Having said that Botrytis Cinerea is also a candidate for the most destructive thing that can happen to a producer’s crop. Imagine a vineyard of Shiraz suddenly being hit by the fungus – no one wants a sweet marmalade character in their full-bodied red wine! It also affects many other plants (strawberries, bulb crops) and can cause devastation for an inexperienced farmer. But for sweet wine it makes for depth, complexity and character – our Chateau La Garenne from Sauternes is a great example!