Octobre in January

Oh what a year it has been! Global shipping has somehow reverted to the 19th century and we're announcing the arrival of 'Octobre' in January. This isn't only a wine I look forward to all year, it's a marker of a special time, the end of the harvest, the beginning of winter, the start of a new vintage... 

We say that wine is about terroir, or that great or fine wines have terroir. And to me, this is all to say that wine can be evocative of a time and a place. Tasting good wine can and should give you information about a place and what it’s like there. This is one of the romantic aspects of wine that serious people roll their eyes at, but we know to be true in the capital ‘T’ sense of ‘True’. The taste of a wine can tell you so much about a place: we learn about its climate, its fauna, its bedrock, its traditions… and you can extrapolate from these bits of information and further truths about the growing season, decisions from the winemaker, harvest conditions, and all sorts of other things. 

The temporal aspect of terroir is one we talk about less. One sense of time, namely vintage, is evident in our conception of terroir. Beaujolais from 2014 means something very specific to me. Bordeaux from 2012, Champagne from 1996, Mosel Riesling from 1971, and plenty other remarkable vintages produced wines with temporally referential qualities such that there’s a date stamped on the taste of the wines. Of course, the same with tough vintages

But there is another sense of temporality that’s proper to the concept of terroir that holds equal weight in a wine’s transportive powers – a more circular sense of time, or a seasonal one. In France, we have the category of primeur wines: the very first wines of the year. Fortunately, Beaujolais nouveau doesn’t exhaust the category of primeur wines. The bottle I’ve come to know and love is a cuvee named simply, 'Octobre', from Jean-François Nicq at Les Foulards Rouge. For anyone with any connection to agriculture in the northern hemisphere, the word itself is an evocation. It’s something properly ancient, and yet also spontaneous and personal. October is a concept we all share, synonymous with autumn and the harvest season in the south of France, where the grapes for this wine are grown. 

Insofar as 'Octobre' is a primeur wine, it is made with a certain conceptual motivation. What’s meant to be preserved in the winemaking process are the flavors of the ripened fruit on the vine – what wine nerds often refer to as ‘primary fruit’. This often means a very short maceration in a reductive environment, where the fruit is protected from oxidation or any outside influence like oak or the regular decomposition of vinification. These are wines usually from young, energetic fruit that boils away in fermentation as quickly as possible, and is bottled as soon as possible. 

We all know these things about primeur wines, but as we sit in the cold and bleak month of January amidst another season of the pandemic, it's nice to remember that these wines are not simply grapes untouched by human intervention. This is a line that I believe comes from the modesty of the artisans we work with. Special wines like 'Octobre' are made by hand, with a design in mind, with a message of joy and optimism that is proper to Octobre for Nicq and anyone with the fatigue of harvest on their mind. That's what this wine is and we love it for that.

So, happy harvest? and here's to a new year of drinking together and being in love.