During the years I worked as a sommelier in Montreal, I memorised a staggering number of “tech sheets”. These were briefing documents used to expand our knowledge of a particular wine’s origins, and to make sure our tableside storytelling was as accurate as could be. On these sheets, one narrative came up frequently: an individual or a couple ripe for a change had gone to oenology school, or learnt from peers, and reinvented themselves as winemakers. I liked telling customers these stories of plucky winemakers who had abandoned financial stability. I liked telling them so much, in fact, that I took the leap myself. I left Canada for Europe and settled on a farm in Germany to start making wine three years ago.
The Major Event of the past few years has made many people re-evaluate their lives. Moving to the countryside to experiment with cabbage-flavoured kombucha is in fashion. But within the world of wine, this phenomenon was already well under way.
Néo-vignerons, as the French have christened us, originate from all walks of life. Some are teachers, journalists or have an artistic background, like Jutta Ambrositsch, a winemaker in the city of Vienna who started out as a graphic designer. Others arrive from careers in hospitality. From selling wine to making wine, there is only the thin line of a dream and many a sommelier has crossed it. There are also chefs looking for an adventure outside the kitchen, such as Laurent Saillard, formerly a New York chef and server, now a celebrated Loire vintner.
Then there is a unicorn category of people who come from a background in science, leaping in with a leg up in chemistry. Left to their own devices, grapes would choose to retire as vinegar. Nudging them off this path requires knowledge of the different yeasts and bacteria that feed on their sugars. Understanding picking dates, winemaking styles, ageing length and vessels requires scientific knowledge as well.
Daniel and Nicola Ham, who operate a small winery in Wiltshire, UK, called Offbeat Wine, previously both worked in the field of marine biology. “We were quite immersed in nature and trained in ecology, but we wanted to do something more hands-on and creative,” the couple told me over email. “We find that winemaking is a good blend of intuition and science.”
The Hams are part of a larger movement of people finding their calling in organic or biodynamic viticulture. In fact, many of the people venturing into wine as a second career choose to embrace this approach. Most new projects are relatively small scale, in order to be humanly manageable and still provide a good quality of life.
Late-blooming vintners are often less concerned about regulations and the weight of regional traditions. This leads to creative ideas when the grapes hit the cellar. Jasmin Swan is a restaurant worker turned vintner based in Rheinhessen, Germany, who has a few vintages under her belt. One of her wines (named Doris) is an unconventional blend of Riesling and Dornfelder, an attractive dark rosé that comes in a litre bottle.
Many newcomers opt to work outside the system of specific regional classification, judging freedom more valuable than these recognisable seals of approval. For example, Ormiale, a low-yield project located in the Entre-Deux-Mers region of Bordeaux, will have some wine within the Bordeaux appellation and others classified as the more permissive Vin de France depending on the style and the vintage. Swan has chosen the base-level Deutscher Wein label and Saillard’s bottlings are all Vin de France.
The wine world has never been more porous. There are many tales floating around of vineyards found on eBay, or through wine communities on social media. Converts are likely to settle in affordable, under-the-radar regions where they can get a good deal on renting or buying vines rather than planting them. The main advantage is that production can start right away and bring in capital. Some vineyards might be in poor shape, but each year the vines grow older is still precious. In the business of nature, time is something you can’t buy. A certain number of new projects forgo the tending of land completely and begin by buying in grapes.
My husband and I placed an ad in a wine forum when we started looking for a farm, and luck eventually found us. Our growing project, Wein Goutte, covers three and a half hectares of vines from which we make wines, ciders and vermouths, alongside some vegetable production.
Many néo-vignerons come to this line of work after being pushed around in stressful jobs, looking for peace, quiet and purpose. But the lifestyle is easy to over-romanticise.
Agnes Lovecká, a winemaker at Slobodné, in Slovakia, puts it like this: “We’re not helping them very much with those pictures on social media, right? The sunsets in the vineyard are not what our regular working days look like.” Her conversion story is one for the books. Her mother and grandfather worked on restitution of their family land after the Velvet Revolution.
“They were talking about ‘the castle’ and we found a devastated estate,” she recalls. Her parents slowly rebuilt it. Lovecká, her sister and their respective partners now operate the farm, after saying goodbye to various office careers in Bratislava. “When our parents decided to leave the city and start rebuilding the farm, I was 18 years old. Village life and working on the farm didn’t appeal to me at all at that point in my life,” she recalls. “I think it was a combination of maturing and the call of family roots that compelled me to quit my job in the city and finally move to the country 12 years later.”
As Lovecká would have known from her parents, taking care of vines is not the same as clocking in and out of an office. It spins your professional and personal life into a blur and requires a wild combination of skills: being good at understanding nature and fermentation, of course, but also at accounting, commerce, communication and human resources. And it turns out that winemaking is a career in which an overwhelming portion of your time is dedicated to cleaning.
It also requires patience. Waiting for grapes to ripen, waiting for juice to ferment, waiting for wine to age. You only get one chance a year to do it right, and so many details can go wrong. Five minutes of hail can destroy your entire income, as seen this year in Piedmont. Spring frost, heatwaves and fires are exponentially multiplying. This intense rollercoaster of climatic chaos, which has peppered the past decade with fear and desolation, will not slow down.
Yet, despite the eco-anxiety and the bottomless piles of paperwork, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Like most people, I came to the farm life looking for a major lifestyle change. I wanted to live in the daylight, trading late nights at the restaurant for early bedtimes and waking up with the sunrise. The true meaning of my life was found at the bottom of a tank, once I had scrubbed it well enough. And when things don’t go to plan, there is always the compensation of a glass of good homemade wine.
Emily Campeau is the co-founder of Wein Goutte. Jancis Robinson is away
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