Can winemakers still be self-taught? Or must they, in this technocratic age, be able to sport some letters after their name?

When I asked Peter Hall, the arch-maverick of Breaky Bottom, how he learnt to make wine, he said, ‘from a book.’ I didn’t believe him, quite, so I asked him again. He said, ‘I’ll review this while I open the next wine. I told my son Jon, who is a sculptor, I could teach him to make wine in 20 minutes. Rubbish, of course. But a few 20-minutes a week…’ So I asked him again. He said, ‘The good Lord above.’ In an Irish accent. Then: ‘I don’t know.’ In other words, This is boring and we’re going to move on.

But Hall knew a wine chemist who helped him and who knew a wine merchant, who gave him an early crit of his wine, and there was that book: nobody is literally self-taught. Nobody reinvents the wheel, or discovers for themselves – who knew? that grape juice can ferment. Everybody who is self-taught has learnt from somebody – probably a lot of people – and then put it all together in their own way. Does it take longer? Maybe. Do they arrive at a different place to the conventionally trained? Almost certainly.

Dirk Niepoort is the epitome of the rebel winemaker, with intuitive wines of super-lightness, innovative blends, nothing done by the book – but he doesn’t believe in intuition. Instead he believes in thinking everything out in advance. ‘I dare more than most,’ he says, ‘I take risks more than most, but it’s not a risk, because I’ve thought about it before.’ But if people want to see him as a shaggy hipster he’s not going to disabuse them, particularly if he’s doing a business deal with them. And when his son Daniel decided to follow him into the business, Dirk pointed him towards Rosa Kruger in South Africa, to producers he favoured in Australia, Argentina, Burgundy – but one noted Burgundy domaine was not on the list, ‘because I didn’t want him to become full of shit’.

Johann Fourie, South African-born winemaker at Leonardslee in Sussex, has three degrees in wine. Was that necessary, in order to get a job? No, he said; he was just interested. But he did think that a course on wine management is necessary for getting a job as a senior winemaking job, because it includes things like managing a team. ‘Some of the best winemakers are self-taught,’ he says.

Thomas Rivers Brown, for example. Brown has no formal training, but is the non-interventionist name behind dozens of top Napa and Sonoma Cabernets, including Outpost Wines, where the erstwhile owner, Frank Dotzler (he now runs it for AXA) describes him as a rock star. As Fourie also says, ‘there is no substitute for actually making wine. It’s a craft you never master. You learn the theory and then you’re confronted with the reality.’

Most jobs are like that, of course. I remember a medical appointment when I saw a charming young doctor straight out of medical school, and like a rabbit in the headlights. And training can only teach you what your teachers know. Kate McIntyre of Moorooduc in Mornington Peninsula says that UCD training indirectly produced the view that Pinot Noir could never work in Australia. ‘So Pinot Noir [in Australia] was relegated to madmen in the 1980s, people who had Burgundy experience. Roseworthy gave terrible advice in the early 1980s [on Pinot].’ Australians who wanted to make great Pinot had to ignore all the advice and take themselves off to Burgundy, to learn from the source. And they did.

There are different ways of approaching tasting, too: Fourie says that critics and judges tend to analyse finished wine and pick it apart – the flavour of this wood, the flavour of that acid – but that’s not quite what winemaking is about. He’s not interested in that: he’s interested in what happens during the process, and why. So maybe critics don’t make good winemakers?

That’s not quite how I put it to Sarah Marsh MW, whose non-conventional training includes stints at various wineries when she was doing her MW, and blending when she was at Armit. But now she’s a writer who makes wine in Burgundy; the first to do so, she says. ‘My approach is not technical,’ she says. If she’d done an actual course she probably would want to be more technical, she reckons, and the winemakers she’s worked with say they have had to forget everything they were taught, and start again. ‘I have no technical training so I am making Burgundy by feeling, and I think that’s the best way to make red. Each of the three red Burgundies – Volnay Santenots, Gevrey-Chambertin (from Combes du Dessus with roots in a plate of limestone) and
Volnay Chevrot, which is naturally fruity and pretty, required a different approach. Of course most winemakers in Burgundy want to express terroir, but some approach every wine as an individual, while others think the terroir is best expressed if they make every wine the same way, and pretty much the same way each year. I’m in the former camp.

‘I have really enjoyed making Meursault,’ adds Marsh, ‘but I think it helps to be very technical when it comes to making white Burgundy. There are a lot of decisions in the first 48 hours and it is necessary to be very precise – this gives the scope to be low interventionist. I have been fortunate that the wine turned out well, but I’ve had clean vintages and excellent grapes. While I have absorbed a good deal of technical information listening to winemakers, I think having a oenology degree is really useful for making white wine, much more so than for red. Not to make a technical wine, but to be fully in control of the process in order to make a wine a minimalist way… and allow the terroir to do the talking.’

What is pretty obvious is that if you’re self-taught then you invent your own career, which can work very well. If you want a salaried job, you need qualifications. Probably. One can imagine the likes of Niepoort taking on somebody regardless of qualifications. But the average multi-national brand-fixated corporation? No. How many mavericks make wine at the big Champagne houses? Zero.

What suggested this subject to me was a conversation with a friend who, among other things, reviews children’s fiction. All the authors now have been on creative writing courses, she says. You can always tell. There’s a saminess.

Writing used to be something you taught yourself, but then so were so many things. Early Australian winemakers were not trained: pioneers in any field aren’t trained. Sir Christopher Wren left school at 14, became assistant to a lecturer in anatomy then went to Oxford, and had a chair in astronomy at Gresham College in the City of London at the age of 25. Designing St Paul’s Cathedral came later.

All those activities – anatomy, astronomy, architecture – now exist in different silos. Winemaking is perhaps less afflicted by silo-mentality than most activities: try and raise a problem with your local council, for example, and you will encounter silo-mentality at its most deadening. The wine trade may be more corporate and less welcoming of eccentricity than it used to be, but there is still a strong current of of refuseniks. As somebody said of sommeliers the other day, ‘Anybody can say they’re a sommelier.’

I said, ‘Well, maybe they are.’

‘But they’re not accredited!’

‘Erm, nor am I. I’m not an accredited wine writer. Is that the end of me?’

‘Never mind,’ said a colleague kindly. ‘You’ve had a good innings.’

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash