It won’t come as a surprise, but being a small natural wine-producing winery is economically extremely tough - especially when you’re a new winery producing something unconventional.
When we bought Shuette from the previous owner and winemaker, he said that we needed to be prepared to lose the equivalent of 100% of the annual production every five years. The hope is that it’s not all at once, but frost, hail, rain, mildew, insects, and problems during spontaneous fermentation can wipe it out in a day.
For many like us, buying a vineyard means risking your life savings on a project you feel extremely passionate about. Shuette is a small 12-hectare vineyard and farm, with 4.5 hectares under vines. In a good year, we could produce 16,000 bottles of wine. However, that has not happened yet.
We make natural wine (wine with no additives) and farm our land in an organic way that is focused on regenerative ecosystem building that is more or less biodynamic.
In Shuette’s first year, there was enormous mildew pressure in Bordeaux. As the pressure mounted, we were advised that the only way to try and protect the harvest was to massively increase our crop spraying, well beyond the limits set for organic farming. My wife and I had promised ourselves that if this happened, we would resist the strong, well-meaning advice, sticking to our principles and work the land as best as possible within organic limitations. We believe that one year’s loss is better than permanently damaging the land through mismanagement. Despite our best efforts, mildew wiped out 100% of our Merlot (45% of our vines) two weeks later, which ripped our hearts out.
Shortly after this genuinely devastating blow, we noticed signs of a vine disease called Flavescence Dorée, caused by cicadas that lay their eggs on vines. When they hatch, they spread a bacterial disease within the plant, suppressing its production and potentially killing it. However, the effects only become noticeable 3–4 years after infection, meaning this issue was not apparent when we bought the vineyard.
Our worst fears were confirmed a couple of months later when we were notified that 20% of two plots were infected, and we were ordered to pull up all the vines in these areas, equating to approximately 3,000 bottles of wine lost per year for the next 4–5 years as we manage the soil and plant new vines to replace them.
By the end of 2023, we were exhausted, and our nerves were frayed. I remember standing in the vineyard, feeling utterly drained and powerless. We knew that the 2023 season would never be able to break even, and almost all our margin for the next 4–5 years would be wiped out by the unproductive Flavescence plots.
2024 started bitterly cold, with almost no wildlife to pollinate the fruit trees. When the cold period finally relented, it did so by bringing 30% more rainfall than usual for months on end, flooding Shuette three times, with water reaching over 30cm deep in places.
By mid-summer, things had improved. Some sunny and, crucially, dry weeks allowed the fruit to set and begin to mature. But we were not out of the woods yet. August was much cooler than usual, and September was no better. With the return of the rains, everyone started to worry about Botrytis - a mould that attacks fragile grapes from deep within the cluster. We decided to wait through three agonising weeks to gain aromatic and pH maturity, and we were rewarded with truly amazing grapes, with only minor damage that could be removed by hand during harvest. It continued to get colder and colder, and the spontaneous fermentation was uncharacteristically slow (due to the low temperatures).
In 2024, we committed to zero-zero winemaking - meaning no additives and no filtering. The idea is to rely completely on the natural process to produce the wine. In previous years, we could have slightly warmed the wine using hot water jackets, again, we stuck to our promise and let fermentation run naturally. To do this, we needed to keep the fermentation tanks open for an extended period - allowing c02 that is naturally produced during fermentation to off gas. It’s hard to say exactly why, but I believe this decision may have cost us a further 4,500 bottles of wine. After some months of maturation, two tanks of wine developed aromas that did not meet our quality standards. With this loss, we can say with certainty that the 2024 season will never break even.
Despite all this, I can honestly say our resolve to produce organic, natural, zero-zero wine has never been stronger. In fact, we are challenging ourselves to take more risks, exploring new styles and more sustainable farming practices every day.
When times are tough, I often think about this excerpt:
“Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho’. We are not now that strength which in old days. Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses.
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