#7 - 2019 The Trouble with Dreams, Sugrue South Downs with Dermot Sugrue

Dermot Sugrue is the winemaker and owner of Sugrue South Downs based in West Sussex in the South of England. With over twenty years of experience making wine in England, Dermot has seen the growth and change in the industry, which gives him a deep perspective on this fascinating part of the wine world. We asked him about the details behind his preference to avoid malolactic conversion, the principles behind blending base wines for sparkling and the practical side of battling with nature in England. 'The Trouble with Dreams' is a flagship wine for his winery and an energetic style of Chardonnay-dominant English Sparkling wine.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:20 Malolactic Fermentation
• 12:38 Blending
• 20:00 Birds and general diseases
• 27:18 Outro

Transcript

Mike  - Welcome to A Bottle and Three Questions with myself, Mike Best and Nelson Pari. Tonight we are interviewing Dermot Sugrue from Sugrue Wines and the bottle is The Trouble with Dreams 2019. Over to you Nelson for the first question. 

Nelson - If there's a theme that connects all the wines in your career, for sure it is this incredibly high racy acidity and let's call it your weird relationship with malolactic fermentation. So we wanted to know about it throughout all the jobs that you had, you know, from Nyetimber, passing through Whiston and now at Sugrue. 

Dermot - So yeah, it's true. I hear all the time people say, oh yeah, Dermot, he never does malo. and uh... it's the it always seems to be a little bit strange a little bit of an exaggeration but of course i think there is there is some truth in this because recently you know i've been making wine for twenty one years now in england which is a little bit remarkable if i think about that too deeply twenty one years of making wine in england this is quite a career really because the industry is so old i seem to be part of it for such a long time I think probably in the last, I think you could probably say decade. Yeah, I've favored when I can avoiding or blocking, however you want to call it, not doing the malolactic on my English sparkling wines on the base wines. Now there's a number of reasons for that. Um, first of all, I'm always making our wines with long aging in mind. This is always a key thing when I make the Sugrue South Downs sparkling wines. It was maybe different when I was making wines under contract as a contract winemaker for other vineyards, when maybe their timeline for when they wanted to release the wines was shorter than the timeline that I'm looking for my wines. You know, what characterizes theSugrue South Downs range is the age of the wines. I mean, I was at the Indigo tasting last night, the 21st birthday of Indigo. and you know, showing a big range of wines actually. The youngest was 2019, the Trouble with Dreams, Cuvée that you've got in front of you there. You know, that wine's on release and we're tasting and drinking it five years after vintage, minimum. Our 2018 Rose X Machina is 18. We've got the Zodo, which is based on 17 vintage. Brendan O'Regan from 16, and our Blanc de Blanc, which is from 2015. You know, all of these wines, when I made them, variously five years to nearly 10 years ago, I'm thinking about when we're going to release them. And I want them, above all, to be fresh and energetic once they are five, six, seven, eight years old. And I find that by blocking the malo during the initial part of the winemaking before bottling, that this... kind of harnesses the energy from the malic acid that we have when the wines are young. And then it allows that to kind of display itself as freshness and energy and vivaciousness and vitality in the wines when they have had four, five, six, seven years on lees. So that's really the main premise for why I do it. Of course, in order to tame that acidity during the winemaking process, I'm always using barrels, or at least almost always I'm using barrels. Old barrels and large barrels in order to develop the texture of the wine and integrate that acidity over time, so it doesn't stick out too much, so it's integrated and it's harmonized with the wine. 

Nelson - And how do you block malolactic? Like, what is your favorite way to do it? 

Dermot - Well, not heat up the tanks is the first kind of step. But really at the press, it's the use on juice, adding a good hit of SO2, I believe in SO2, SO2 works. It protects the wine from oxidation, it protects it from spoilage, it keeps it nice and tight and lean. And I do believe in using a decent amount of SO2 at the press, particularly if I know I'm not going to be doing malolactic. 

Mike - And for the real geeks, what would that look like in terms of the numbers of the, how many parts SO2 would you add? 

Dermot - I'd go somewhere between 50 and say up to 80 or maybe even 90 parts per million or milligrams per liter. If I wanted to do malolactic, let's say, then I'd be adding about 50. If I know I want to block that malo, then I'll be adding 70, 80 or 90. Kind of depends on the pH of the juice, but it also depends on what press fraction that I'm adding the SO2 to. So if it's the Premier QV, you know it's the first 50% extraction, then naturally you're going to have lower pH. and higher TA in that QV. Once you then move on to the next phase of pressing, what I call the premier tie, what the Champenois call the premier tie, and then the deuxieme tie after that, which we never ever, ever use and hardly ever use the premier tie, we can deploy that in other things maybe that we're making. But the pH is higher naturally, so you'll need more SO2 to be effective. And there's more material there for the SO2 to bind to, so it'll be less effective. So I generally use a higher amount of SO2 on the Premier Tie and, you know, very often we don't even press the deuxieme tie, but if I was taking that, you need to use a slightly higher amount as well. I was going to say the key thing really that I've learned, I guess, over the years, in order to be able to have this, you know, this broad strategy of blocking the malo rather than encouraging the malo is in the vineyard, is ripe grapes. This is absolutely the key things. It remains the case that we can make really good sparkling wines in England even in relatively poor vintages or at least vintages that aren't fully phenologically ripe let's say. Vintages that maybe have been a little bit and then hampered by disease in bad season and bad weather, not enough good weather in say September, but particularly October, the picking month. And the beauty of having very ripe grapes is that you're not forced to put it through malolactic in order to get the wine into the correct parameters that you want to make a sparkling wine. So I would suggest the only time that I'm pursuing this non-malo strategy is when I know. I've got very, very ripe grapes and we've just gotten better and better and better, you know, as a small company, as vineyard growers and winemakers at how to optimize that ripeness and what risks are necessary to take. And we do take risks, you know, we absolutely do take risks. Across the range of Sugrue South Downs, they are Chardonnay dominant wines, grown. on chalk. That's what the project is all about. And we take risks. We know, I know, always the very, very best time to pick your Chardonnay, and certainly the last of your Chardonnay, so you ensure you've got optimum ripeness that year, is to pick it just before. Botrytis obliterates almost everything that's in the vineyard. Then you know you have picked... at the very last opportunity and you've eked out as much ripeness as you possibly could that year. 

Nelson - Now talking specifically about the trouble with dreams, is there any malo or any partial malo or do you in case blend some base wines where the malo is blocked and some there are like completely like 100% with malolactic fermentation? So how does it all work? 

Dermot - Yeah. For instance, in 2014, big harvest, big year. Big yield. I did malolactic on the Chardonnay in 2014. I had the ability to heat up the tanks, so I did that. So you could say, going back to exactly 10 years ago, isn't it 2014 Trouble with Dreams, which was one, two, three, the fifth vintage of Trouble with Dreams. I'm doing it in two ways. I've got two grape varieties really, Chardonnay and Pinot. I've got... more or less half of that wine in barrels. Yeah, malo isn't going to happen in those barrels because traditionally when I was making those wines at Winston, the barrel hall was the coldest part of the winery and there was even a colder part still called Little Siberia in the winery. So that's never going to warm up to be able to go through malo. But then the other half of the wine more or less I'd have in stainless steel tank and that I was able to heat the tank and indeed then cool the tank when I needed to do that. But look, it's also, you know, malolactic, doing malolactic is hard. It's actually very, very hard. I tried my heart out in 2009 to do malo on a lot of different wines I was making that year, because 2009 was a, again, it was a very big vintage. There was good sugar maturity, but there was very high acidity with that high, high sugar levels, high maturity levels. And I wanted to do malo on a number of wines. And because some vineyards had cropped so highly, there was a really high amount of malic acid in there. There was, you know, not, you know, in champagne, they kind of, they'll do a very routine analysis to see if the malic grams per liter is less than four or greater than four. And that's kind of an indication for them whether they need to do malo or not. In England that year, we were like nine and 10 grams per liter of malic acid in the juice. Now that's actually an incredibly toxic environment to put malolactic bugs into and just expect them to fly very low pH and alcohol and SO2 and high levels of malic acid, which of course you want the bugs to be able to eat to gobble up. That's a very, very kind of limiting environment for bugs to flourish. So I actually had a lot of difficulties in some years trying to get the malo established in the wine. And of course, once you're trying to get the malloc to be established, and there's always a lag phase once you do your inoculation, you build your mother culture of your bugs, you do the inoculation, you heat up the tank to 20, 21 degrees centigrade, and then there's a lag phase before the population becomes sufficiently large to actually start acting on the malloc and start turning it into lactic. And sometimes that lag phase is really, really long. and you're kind of looking at the tank going, well, I've been cooking this tank at 21 degrees centigrade, you know, for a month and a half now, and it still hasn't kicked off. And instinctively as a winemaker, you just think, I don't wanna be cooking this tank of wine at 21 degrees centigrade in December, you know? I always had this strange little thought as well, and I don't know how scientifically rigorous it is, but there's a mystical notion to it here is that You know, I think the bugs know when it's December in England outside the tank and you're heating them up to 20 and 21 and making them think that they're, you know, in the South of France or something like that in December. It's not the case. Sometimes the bugs just don't want to do something. And then other times, of course, we all know this, that, you know, in the spring, you know, Malo can just kick off in tanks, even if the SO2 is relatively high. Yeah, it's an interesting world of malolactic in England. It's not straightforward during the malolactic fermentation. 

Mike - So I'd like to move on to our second question, which is a fascinating one for me, asking about blending. So of course, blending is a question for every winemaker, but the difference with the sparkling winemaker from a still winemaker is that you have to blend the wine before its second fermentation. So what are the key decisions really? I mean, what are you looking for in terms of the flavors, the structure, and is there anything different than people might expect for making still wines? That's really, I'm really keen to get your thoughts on that. 

Dermot - Okay, so I think blending is very, very often over complicated in its perception. And maybe we can blame the champagne houses for that, the great champagne houses for that, for always talking about the, you know, the mysterious blending process of the expert chef de cave and, you know, following on from generations and Aletonde de mon grand-père, blah, blah. It's really not that complicated, I'd suggest, or at least once you become gain experience of it, you know, it's like, you know, any of us, particularly you two guys, I would suggest, you've tasted a million wines in your time, and the detailed files that you build up from tasting all of those wines, then becomes a depository of information that you draw on automatically when you taste new wines or the wines, whatever. It's the same really, it's the same but different. It's the same when you're a winemaker and you're making a very specific and distinct style of wine for a long period of time in the same place. You really do build up that kind of muscle memory of what you're looking for and what a single wine doesn't have and what other wines will give to that. And I've always approached it very pragmatically. If I've got 10 tanks, let's say the goal is to... make six of them into one wine and make four of them into another wine or whatever and then you start the Jigsaw puzzle piece. Well that always starts for me before Christmas, you know, you can see how the wines after alcoholic first fermentation are starting to play themselves out. If you're heating up your tanks it gets a little bit muddled because you can't taste stuff very well that's full of bugs and 21 degrees centigrade. That's not that's not funny. That's not fun, I should say. But early on in the winemaking process, and then certainly once we go into January, February and cold temperatures and the wines start to show their definition, then that's when I'm kind of assimilating what's good about them and what maybe they lack. And I always just think of it as a wine has got three stages. It's the attack, the start, it's the middle, it's the finish, you know? And if you've got a tank of wine, it's like, wow, it's a great attack, really interesting mid-palate. And then the finish is really, really good and detailed. Wow, that's a great, great bit of material and arguably you could make a wine on its own with that tank, you know. Other tanks then may, you may have a little bit of a, you know, great attack and then just kind of wander around in the center of the pallet and not be terribly interesting and have a good finish or the other way around. Some wines are just really, really short. They can have a great nose. They can show something really interesting like that. But, you know, each wine, I look for the component parts of each wine and then how to enhance them with other wines which have got a different balance like that. You've also got to have a pretty good vision of what it is you want to make before you know it. And that really will come together at the time of harvest. You know, you kind of get an idea, wow, this isn't going to be a Chardonnay year. The pinot are the ones that are going to sing here, so. I think I'm going to scrap the idea of trying to make a super Blanc de Blancs this year because guess what? You don't have the component parts. You don't have the raw ingredients to do that. So there's a lot of... I follow the wines almost obsessively, I would suggest, and maybe if it's... My dentist would suggest that if I was to taste those young wines less, then my teeth would probably be in better condition than they are now, but that's just the part of it. I love tasting those wines. I love tasting wines that are raw and vigorous. And I can very often see a lot of kind of beauty or potential in those. And then that guides you as to what to use. And then what may be to, I won't say discard because wine is expensive to produce, you know? But you want to direct and deploy other wines, other batches or components. into lesser wines, should we say. 

Mike - So when you approach a tank and you have the sample there, what would you forgive that wine for and what would you not forgive it for when it's in its raw state? 

Dermot - Well, the wine needs to be absolutely clean, you know, clean and fresh. Reduction is a friend. I've not really got a problem with stinky wines unless they go very, very stinky because... Reduction keeps things fresh and means that you're not going in the direction of oxidation. I always keep the wines on lees, of course, when they're in stainless steel, because that's a huge, huge protecting factor. What am I looking for? I suppose it's just, you know, some wines, they're just like, it's like touching a bell or something like that when you taste them. And other wines, they're just a little bit... discordant, a little bit muddled or something like that. And that's really, again, what I look for when I'm putting together wines. I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here, you know? The cuvee kind of strategy, the blend strategy right from the start of Trouble of Dreams is that Chardonnay dominant wine. More or less 60 Chardonnay, 40 Pinot Noir. Now... That's what I say on the label of all of the trouble dreams and that's what the cepage is. It's not necessarily exactly that. Some years it's 58, 42. Other years it's 63 and a half and 36 and a half or whatever. Because there's a biting point and I think this is a good analogy. It's like you're clutching your accelerator in your car. Between these two varieties, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, there's a biting point between the two of them. And it's not the same every year, of course. But you do get it, you know, we're doing the different blends so what I tend to do now is I tend to put together roughly a 60 40 blend and Then I polish that blend either with the addition of a little bit more Chardonnay or the addition of a little bit more Pinot and then you find that little that perfect BING note when you when you when you find that biting point and I'm always kind of led by that and those really are the very final tweaking moments before tirage, before then you have your beautifully clear cold stabilized and gently filtered wine that you then put lots of sugar and lots of yeast into and you completely muddle it up as you put it into bottles for the next three, four, five years. 

Nelson - You call this wine the trouble with dreams because I've read that in 2008 during the night birds devoured all the grapes I think that people forget the practical issues sometimes of running a vineyard and I wanted to ask you what does it mean for you to battle with nature in this way and more specifically how do you manage the pest management, you know including birds and other animals as you had this problem and also it would be really interesting because you know when we meet up with you, we always talk about what happens in the cellar, but rarely what happens in the vineyard. So it would be great to hear from you about it. 

Dermot - Yes, it's a really good question. You know, we, I wouldn't say, well, you could say it's a battle with nature, but you know, it's, it's dealing with all of the hazards and complications that a growing season has right from the beginning to, to right to the end. And you know, the kind of first real hurdle to get over after you've done your all of your hard work in terms of pruning and pulling out and tying down your canes is to avoid frost. Now when you avoid frost like we did this year, this is an amazing cause for celebration because that's the first real kick in the shins, knee in the balls that you want to avoid at the start of the year. Luckily we're on the South Downs, we're very close to the English Channel, this is a big moderating effect on how cold frosts can get. and all of our vineyards have some strong slope, Mount Harry, and Cold Harbor's got a good slope as well. Starrington is kind of on the top of a little hillock in Starrington, so no cold air ever comes to sit there anyway. But yeah, frost is the nightmare. Then once things grow, it's just all about dealing with disease, anticipating disease, and protecting your vines against disease. It's so difficult to be an organic grower and make high quality wine in the UK. Of course you can be an organic grower. I don't suggest you're going to make fantastic wine because very often you won't reach optimum ripeness because your vines will be struggling with disease. So we've got to protect against disease and that means spraying. Yeah, we're as conscientious and as sustainable as we can be. We don't use herbicides. We want to preserve microbiology of the soil. That's a hugely important thing. And I was one of the first people in the UK to bring in a basile intervine cultivator back in 2008 at Winston. So we didn't use any herbicides there and were cultivating. But you know, the canopy, you need to keep it clean because the canopy is the engine room for brightness. Two such contrasting years. 2022. Sorry, I beg your pardon, 23 last year and 24 this year. I actually got a memory thing on my phone, you know, it brings up on my phone a year ago, this is it. I took it from the vineyard at Mount Harry one year ago. And it just looked amazing. There were just bunches everywhere. Veraison had started, there are dark black bunches, and we had a meter of just solid green leaf. You know, just looked amazing, this engine for ripeness. This year, things look different, man. We've had downy mildew that has really, really come in hard. Many, many, many vineyards have been hugely affected by it. Luckily for us, it's only one of our vineyards, which suddenly has kind of displayed these symptoms. We kept it clean all year, and then suddenly we've got these symptoms now for the last 10 days. We can kill that disease, we can kill downy mildew, but it causes defoliation. You lose your canopy. And that's just a difficult thing to have to deal with because especially like a day like today, it was crap weather. I don't know what it's like where you guys are, but I drove to Heathrow and back today and it was just horrible weather. It was raining, it was windy, it was cold. Now, if you're gonna have a deleted canopy going into your last month of ripening and there's sunshine, well then you've got a chance. If you've got a deleted canopy and it's cold and wet and windy on the 11th or 12th, what are we today? I think we're on the 12th or 11th of September, then that's a scary thing. And because the next thing and the next challenge now is botrytis. But you can get so fixated on those things, like I was back in 2008, which should have been the first Trouble with Dreams vintage, and then suddenly, you know, birds absolutely devour and devastate your crop. literally overnight the night before you're going to pick it up. And it's just like, where did that come from? Quite literally. 

Nelson - Are birds still a problem? And is it something that happened because of climate change or the birds finally, they saw some grapes as I was something new. You know, we're in England. We never saw that. And we just went nuts on it. So what's the thing about it? 

Dermot - I think for sure. So I think for sure, you know, vineyards are not very common. Suddenly. in this part of the world where there's never been a vineyard, well, at least that's what we think, you know, there's like from the sky, birds see, you know, one million tasty berries on bunches. Now, in recent years, we did something about it, which I'll tell you about in a moment, but in recent years, we've had more pheasants. I mean, there's a lot of big shoots now, bigger and more commercial shoots going on over the last kind of 10 years. And so, you know, pheasants, Pheasants love, what do they love? Woodland. You know, what's the perfect looking woodland substitute? It is, you know, 4,000 vines in a hectare of land. You know, they love that. And so pheasants are a problem, but pheasants are thick, man. They can fly over obstacles. Deer are a massive problem. If you do not have a two meter high deer fence surrounding all of your vineyard, deer will come in and eat your... buds once they burst and you've survived your frost, let's say, and then if you don't have a deer fence, deer will come in and they will eat everything. They will just munch an incredible amount of stuff. What we did after the catastrophe of 2008 not happening, you know, I was picking 15 kilos of fruit rather than picking one ton of fruit, I got a phone call. the next year and it was from a lady, Lady Meryl Walters is her name and she lived down the road from me. She said, Dermot, I've just been judging today at a local primary school a scarecrow making competition. Now if you'd like them I've got seven scarecrows here. Would you like them? So I put the trailer onto the back of the Land Rover and fucking raced down there and I collected seven scarecrows. And then we put them up over Starrington. for the next year. The best one was Michael Jackson, he even had little white gloves on, more scary than the others. And we then hung CDs and tinsel and streamers. You can see the vineyard from space. And yeah, we haven't had any problems again. 

Mike - So we'd very much like to thank Dem at Sugru of Sugru from the South Downs. We had the 2019 Trouble with Dreams and the three questions were about malolactic fermentation, blending... and battling with nature to make English wine. Thanks, Dermot. 

Dermot - Cheers, guys. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Nelson. It'll be a pleasure. Take care. Ciao.