Taking off with the flying winemakers

They used to call them flying winemakers, a phrase designed to recall the airborne medics from the country where so many of them originated. This was back in the 1980s, when the wines of Australia and the rest of the New World were riding high on the first waves of their iconoclastic success. European wineries, desperate to bring a little of the New World’s technical precision and bold fruitiness to revive their lacklustre wines and flagging sales, called on the services of (more often than not) Australians. Bluff, gruffly confident gurus in mirrored sports sunnies, cut-down denim short s and hardy Blundstone boots, who would spend their time hopping from client to client dispensing wisdom on yeasts and fermentation temperatures, before jetting back Down Under for Christmas.

By the 1990s, and 2000s, the more widely used term was “consultant”, which better reflected the multinational origins of this growing caste of international winemakers, many of whom had dozens of winery clients on their books in all four corners of the vinous world. From the US, Italy, New Zealand and Spain they came, but the most sought-after of these globetrotting consultants was a Frenchman, Michel Rolland, the scion of a winemaking family in Pomerol, Bordeaux.

The success of Rolland, who died earlier this spring, depended to a large degree on his reputation as “the Parker whisperer”, since his counsel seemed to reliably produce wines that appealed to the palate of American wine critic Robert Parker. His scores out of 100 could make or break a wine’s reputation and price at the height of his all-powerful influence in the 2000s.

Like Parker, who tended to prefer powerful, boldly fruited wines, Rolland became a symbol of what many at the time saw as the unacceptably standardising force of globalisation in the wine world in the early years of this century. He peddled a recipe, the criticism went, that always pushed grapes to their maximum ripeness, effacing local differences to the point where everything he was involved in – from Armenia and India to Croatia, Uruguay, New Zealand, Argentina – tasted rather like something from a ripe vintage in his native Pomerol.

My first encounter with Rolland back in 2007 did little to counteract this caricature. He pulled up to an estate I was visiting in Cahors, southwest France in a gleaming chauffeur-driven black Mercedes for an early-summer consultation that lasted all of half an hour. But I always thought there was more to him (and Parker) than his reputation allowed. His wines may have had similarities, but often (especially when tasted blind) they surprised me with their finesse.

T hese days, the very concept of the consultant runs counter to fashionable thinking about how to make the best, most characterful wine: the ideal is for a vigneron to never stray too far from the home vineyards they have come to know as intimately as their family. But t here are plenty of successful consultants still clocking up the airmiles, and there are many more winemakers who prove that it is possible to bring something new and fresh to a region they hardly know.

I’m always happy to try anything that Portuguese winemaker Dirk Niepoort is involved in, for example, whether that’s the ports and table wines he makes at the family home in Portugal’s Douro Valley, or projects he’s involved with in Germany’s Mosel, Jerez, the Gredos mountains of Spain or Bairrada, central Portugal (the crunchy fresh Nat Cool Drink Me Baga Red 2024, £21, 1 litre, Buon Vino). I also love the wines made by South African Marc Kent at both his original home estate Boekenhoutskloof (the suave, darkly fruited Winemaker Series Red 2022, £11.50 as part of a mixed case of six, Majestic) and with his partner Rita Marques in Vinho Verde in Portugal (the super-zippy white Invincible Vinho Verde 2024, £10.50, Sainsbury’s).

Another fine result of a winemaker going away to work is the tiny production new Rioja red Chorus 2024 (£250 in bond for three 75cl bottles, Hatch Mansfield). It’s an impossibly graceful record of what happened when Jorge Navascués, winemaker at top Rioja estate Contino, opened up his vineyard and winery to Guillaume Thienpont from the finest estate in Rolland’s home of Pomerol, Vieux Château Certan.