Book extract: The Truant From Medicine

Ivan Donaldson had earned an international reputation in medical circles before he retired from clinical work at Christchurch Hospital and as professor of neurology at the Otago School of Medicine, Christchurch, aged 60. By then another interest had overtaken his medical career – winemaking. He and his wife Chris established the Pegasus Bay winery and restaurant at Waipara in the 1990s. In this first of two extracts from his memoir, he describes the first vintage.

Although we had made a little win in 1990, it was not enough to see the light of day from a commercial point of view. Our first real vendange in 1991 was a simple little affair but an exciting event for us, nonetheless. We had bought plastic crates and pairs of snips for our team of relatives, friends and helpful hangers-on, not to mention ourselves and our employees. We had to work over several weekends, harvesting each variety, not when it had reached its optimum, but when we felt it was good enough and the birds had still left us some berries on the vines.

These were the days before we had nets and the pressure from our feathered friends largely decided when we picked. The volunteers’ only reward was a decent lunch. On one occasion a Maori employee dug a pit in the earth, filled the bottom with stones from the vineyard, lit a fire and, when it had died down to become embers, doused it with water. She then proceeded to put in large slabs of meat and vegetables, which were in turn covered with wet sacks and earth.

Later we all dined on a deliciously cooked hangi. There were shouts of joy when I produced bottles of a gold-medal Müller-Thurgau. Doubtless these would have been less enthusiastically received today, given this grape variety’s disastrous fall in the fashion rankings. Nonetheless, I still cannot think of a better hangi wine!

Progress was slow and there was the inevitable snipped fingertip to test Chris’s nursing skills and possibly add a little colour to the eventual red wine. We could not complain, however. We had a happy, largely unpaid crew and in the end we had a decent enough crop of grapes. These were ferried back to our new winery, the only legally registered winery in Christchurch. There, I hoped to turn it into saleable wine and perhaps gain a little income to help offset the financial haemorrhaging.

Making wine out of grapes largely involves watching over and controlling the action of yeasts, as they ferment the grapes’ sugars and turn them into alcohol. Because the pigment resides in the skin and is extracted by the alcohol, it is necessary to ferment the berries to make a red wine. A white, however, is made only from the juice obtained after pressing. Fermentation releases carbon dioxide and heat. When making a red, the carbon dioxide bloats the grapes, causing them to rise to the surface where they form a ‘cap’. This may dry out and needs to be regularly moistened by pushing (‘punching’) it back down into the forming wine with a plunger. It can be hard work, particularly on the abdominal and arm muscles. Eventually, the supply of sugar in the grapes is exhausted and the fermentation finishes. The so-called ‘free-run red wine’ is drained from the vat and the ‘pressings’ or ‘press wine’ is extracted from the grape remnants by using a press.

But making the wine is really only the start of the oenologist’s task. The French consider it to be a bit like becoming a parent and, as any mum knows, having a baby is the easy part. The really hard work is in raising the child. The French use the term élévage for this phase of the winemaker’s task. It means rearing, bringing up or training, and they apply it to children and animals as well as wine. As a father and a teacher of medical students I was well aware of the implications of élévage and I did not intend to shirk my responsibilities. When the euphoria of tasting the first free-run wine from our vineyard had passed, Chris and I were reluctantly forced to agree that we did not have a little angel but a cheeky young brat.

Having raised four sons we thought we knew a little about the business of élévage. Children need lots of rest, so we put ours into wooden barrels and left them to sleep. In the following spring and early summer it seemed as if the teenage years had kicked in. They became rebellious, and unless we were careful they were given to explosions without warning. In our winery we occasionally had bungs blowing out of barrels as our kids tried to break loose with a hiss and a roar. Like a teenager’s ebullience, this rebellion was quite natural. It was due to the bacteria that convert one type of natural acid, malic, into another called lactic. This secondary or malolactic fermentation results in reduction in the acid level and it is essential for a red wine’s stability. Thus, after this bout of exuberance, the wine and the teenager are expected to be softer, mellower and more stable. In spite of this, both need a further period of élévage, training and encouragement to help them achieve their full potential. It is only then that the little darlings are ready to make their social debut.

We were trying to make wine that would not only be ready to drink on release but would also cellar well for many years. As it was the product of a new vineyard we were uncertain how it would age. Wine is like a living thing and it gradually evolves in the bottle. We wanted our debutante to also be a sleeping beauty. We hoped that, if in years to come some charming Prince Purchaser stumbled upon a forgotten glass casket, he would not be shocked to find that his lips had really awakened an old hag! But Sleeping Beauty is just a fairy tale. Perhaps we were expecting too much — or were we?

In the mid-1990s a group of young Turk winemakers from the famous Saint-Émilion region of Bordeaux broke with tradition and began to produce a new-style red wine as a reaction against the classic clarets of the area. These were quite tannic, lean and hard, requiring years of cellaring before being ready to drink. These young oenologists made wines that were plumper, fruitier, more succulent and more immediately appealing. They did not need to be cellared for long periods, but could be enjoyed at or soon after their release. The pundits questioned whether the wines would disintegrate with age, but time has shown that they can stay the pace. They were very popular, although expensive, especially as they came from producers without well-established track records.

Proprietors of prestigious châteaux, with centuries of tradition behind them, looked down their noses at their neighbours and turned up their snouts at such wines. They were called Vins du Garage, because they were generally made in small, humble premises rather than on grand estates. The winemakers became known as garagistes. Without knowing it, we had just become real garagistes, before anyone had ever heard of those cheeky little upstarts from Bordeaux!

© Extracted with permission of the publisher, Random House New Zealand