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My Mate Brett

Written by Giles MacDonogh

My Mate Brett

Posted: 1st April 2022

I was at a wine writers’ dinner not so long ago. We had volunteered to bring bottles from our collections. There was a mature Côte Rôtie from a top grower on the table. I liked it, but I was told by a neighbour it had ‘Brett’. The wine was subsequently severely ostracised. Later on when most of the other contributions had been drunk up, I returned to the pariah. It didn’t seem so bad to me: there were one or two rustic notes that were well in accord with the better Syrah wines I enjoyed in my youth, so I enjoyed another couple of glasses before I left.

‘Brett’ or ‘Brettanomyces’, to give it its full name, is a wild yeast that can give a wine a farmyard character evidently much decried these days. It seems to be particularly noticeable in cask-aged wines made from Syrah (Shiraz) and Pinot Noir. Thirty years ago not much was known about it. When I travelled to Australia in 1990 (where coincidentally every second Australian seems to be called ‘Brett’) to write a book about Syrah, I was fed horror stories about the wines of the Hunter Valley that gave off an unpleasant ‘sweaty saddle’ aroma: a leathery note that could with time become stilton rinds or horse manure. When I finally reached the Valley, some examples were presented to me. One or two of these wines were indeed quite undrinkable.

No one spoke of ‘Brett’ then which was mostly (positively) associated with beer. There were various explanations doing the rounds, the most common was a hydrogen sulphide character or ‘mercaptan’ but with time scientists nailed it down to unwelcome natural yeasts that floated round barrel cellars. Steps were then taken to make wines more hygienically. The farmyard returned to its byre.

The Rhone Valley in France had provided the Syrah grape for Australian Shiraz wines. Working on the same book I visited the cellars of some of the Valley’s top producers on a number of occasions. At Guigal or Jaboulet they showed you with pride the great candyfloss moulds on their cellar walls. They definitely attributed the character of their wines to some magic performed by this fungus. Other cellars were plain filthy, like those of Henri Bonnot or indeed Jacques Reynaud at Château Rayas in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but together with Guigal and Jaboulet, they were both beloved of the Guru of Baltimore, Robert Parker, who awarded them fantastic scores in his Wine Advocate.

Further north on the Côte d’Or, farmyard smells were also possible; indeed, one of the luminaries of the trade, Anthony Hanson made rather a name for himself by telling the world that good red Burgundy smelled like ‘shit’ (his word). That earthy character I knew and liked in top Burgundy wines I find less and less now. I should imagine that better cellar hygiene and improved technical education has more or less eliminated those unwanted, ambient yeasts.

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Giles MacDonogh

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