A vine romance: heritage grapevines

Is it wrong, or weird, or a sign of impending madness, to feel affection for a plant? Maybe. But it’s certainly not unusual. As the outpouring of grief during the Sycamore Gap saga showed, such feelings are often only just below the surface. And the truth is, many of us will have experienced something similar after the felling of a favourite, stalwart tree, even if our feelings only really came to light once the tree was gone.

It’s usually trees that provoke this level of make-a-grown-man-cry emotion, but there is another plant that can exert a similarly strange, insidious sylvan power over the people who interact with it: some winegrowers treasure grapevines, and specifically vines more than 35 years old, in a way that goes far beyond the straightforwardly transactional relationship a farmer would have with other crops.

A number of these committed vine-lovers from all over the world congregated in London this month, drawn to the latest instalment of the Old Vine Conference. It’s one of many events put together over the past few years by a non-profit organisation of the same name, which, in the words of its mission statement, aims “to bring together a global network to create a new category for wine from heritage vineyards.”

The organisation is somewhere between a conservation NGO and a generic marketing body, and a mix of sentiment and hard-headed business acumen motivates its campaign to put the spotlight on old vineyards, many of which are in danger of being grubbed up and replaced with more productive new vines, or different crops entirely. In crude terms, the OVC wants to enshrine the idea of old-vine wine as a special category worth paying more for, so old-vine growers can cover the much greater cost of working very low-yielding old vines and keep these precious plants in the ground.

Precious? For Sarah Abbott, the British Master of Wine who co-founded and leads the organisation, the value of old vines is multifaceted. There’s a cultural element: old vines of 50, 100 or even – in the case of Yokich, one Bolivian vineyard whose fascinating wines were on show at the London conference – 250 years old, are a kind of repository of local winemaking traditions, agricultural heritage and what Abbott calls “cultural resilience”. A growing body of evidence also suggests old vines are better adapted to extremes in the climate. They certainly require far fewer inputs: their deep roots mean they are much easier, for example, to “dry farm” since there’s no need for irrigation which demands access to precious, dwindling and increasingly expensive water reserves.

There’s also a matter of the quality of the wines. According to Abbott, merely having old vines isn’t a “guarantor of quality”. “But,” she says, “an old vine in the right place, farmed in the right way and made by a talented winemaker for whom these vines are a kind of muse” can bring an “extra 5%” that makes all the difference. While they may be very different in style, good old wines all share a “quality of vitality, a light behind the eyes,” Abbott says, thanks to an inherent balance and intensity of flavour.

Not everything I tasted at the conference supported Abbott’s thesis. But there were plenty of bottles that were highly persuasive: wines such as the silky-soft, pleasingly sour red-fruited Pasaeli Old Vines Karasakiz, Aegean, Turkey 2024 (£30, Amathus; 40-year-old vines); the gently herbal and orange-tangy Domaine des Tourelles Skin, Bekaa Valley, Lebanon 2023 (£21.99, Vino Fandango; 150-year-old vines); and the luminous swish of peach and apple of Bellevue Heritage 1974 Chenin Blanc, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2025 (£44.99, Portman Wine, 52-year-old vines).

In their very different ways, all these wines show what Abbott calls “the energy and vibrancy” of good old vine wine, a quality that, all sentiment aside, seems worth paying for.