Wine 201: Hills & Mountains

Why some of the world's greatest vineyards are where they are

You’re subscribed to this nerdy, pretty niche substack because you’re curious about wines, more than the average Joe who is content with just knowing that Chablis is Chardonnay. Maybe not so much as a hypothetical crazy person who changed their entire life and career to pursue the ever elusive grape juice after some classes during their third life crisis (hypothetical!)—but you’re intrigued.

And then you hear this person rave about certain wines from certain places and you think, what is all this talk about Grands Crus and these other specific vineyards? Why do people fangirl over them and spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars? Does it really matter? The short answer is a resounding yes. And just like everything else in wines there are a myriad factors that go into what makes great wines so great, but today we’re going to look into how hills and mountains make some vineyard sites superior.

Hillsides

A lil review on slopes vs. the sun from the previous Wine 201 post: the greater the slope grade, the greater the intensity of sunlight the vines receive.

It’s beneficial to have vines on slopes especially in cooler climate regions where every drop of sunlight is crucial to ripen grapes, but it’s not the only reason slopes and hillsides are superior. Contrary to what you may think, the best grapes for wine do not come from vines that have received lots of nutrition in the most fertile soils. Such conditions would actually result in the vines using their energy to grow more leaves and shoots, and their grapes would be watery and lacking flavor.

On slopes, water and nutrition run down the hill, leaving the sites on the incline with less of both, making them have better drainage and poorer soils, while the foothills accumulate all the fertile richness. Well drained soil prevents excess water to pool which prevents root rot, but what it also does more importantly is force the grape vines to grow roots that dig deeper into the soil in search of water and nutrients. The vines end up growing stronger, more intricate root systems that become not only better at reaching for nutrients, but also great at regulating water absorption. As opposed to the vines that are essentially coddled and spoiled like overprotected nepobabies in fertile sites, slopes create sturdier, more resilient vines by making them work for it.

While poor nutrition and well drained soils aid in character development, vines are in extreme stress under these conditions. Just like some people may think “oh I can’t have children in these sad destitute conditions!” as climate change and the world continuously turns for the worse, the vines then also decide the environment isn’t suitable. Unlike humans, instead of deciding to not have kids, they do the opposite and use their energy less on the canopy and more on producing fruits to increase the chances of survival of its kind by luring birds to eat them and transfer the next generation of vines to a hopefully better site after they poop out the seeds somewhere else.

More sugars from photosynthesis are sent to add flavor and aroma to the berries for the sole purpose to make the birds want to eat them—except it just so happens that this is awesome for humans to make our little drinksies, and we squander their hopes and dreams of spreading their offspring.

Slopes provide unideal environments for the vines to thrive which in turn give us the ideal grapes (counterintuitive I know), but they do allow for better conditions to ripen the grapes after they stress the hell out of the plant.

What do we need to ripen grapes again? Warmth. We talked about direct sunlight, but let’s get into the temperature of the surrounding air.