Range

or you can toot your own horn...

I grew up around band people. My father played tuba in the SMU Mustang Marching Band and also played it in the Air National Guard. He still claims he fought the Vietnam War with a tuba, traveling through Europe playing for troops. I played tuba too, in middle school. I was fine at it. My sister played flute through high school. She was much much better than me. Different instruments, different roles, all of them taken seriously.

I’m surprised how much I think about this from time to time.

Not just the sentimental aspect, but how people understand their place in something larger, are a part of something that’s bigger than their part. Not every instrument carries a piece the same way, some hold a piece together, some shine through on their own and some only make sense after everything else is there.

I’ve always been drawn to this aspect of music composition. Not the idea of the composer as a genius imposing order, but the discipline of listening closely enough to know what each part is actually doing or could do (or shouldn’t).

Of course, this is how I think about wine.

Bordeaux has always made sense to me in this way. Its native language is blending, but not as a corrective act. Not as a way to hide flaws or chase some idea of balance, because at its best, blending is a way of understanding. Yet the best don’t start with the assumption that everything belongs together, instead you start by learning what each piece is capable of.

That means you need to work through a block instead of assuming it is one thing. Picking at different moments, playing with ripeness, tension, texture in order to let the season show itself in different ways across the same parcel. What starts out looking uniform at a distance starts to separate and you begin to see range, you start learning what each piece is capable of.

And once you see that range, the hierarchy shifts.

The component that feels richest on its own is not always the one you need most. Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes what matters is the lot with more tension, or less weight, or a narrower expression that gives the rest of the wine its shape. Like instruments, some lots carry the wine, while others sharpen or hold things together and some only make sense once everything else is there.

Not everything deserves a solo.

There’s nothing wrong with a solo. Some wines must be heard on their own. I’m committed to finding out whether a single grape variety on a single site can stand convincingly on its own in our corner of Bordeaux, but I’m also skeptical of the current fixation on it. The solo has become a form of prestige that suggests purity and confidence.

That idea travels well and sells easily, but just because something can stand alone doesn’t mean it says the most on its own.

A single instrument can be arresting in the right situation. It can also become narrow, even exhausting… I’m looking at you saxophone. If every variety and block is forced to prove itself that way, you get a lot of noodling and navel gazing. I shudder to imagine a world made up entirely of solos. The problem isn’t the instrument, but rather it’s the insistence that it should stand alone in order to matter.

That has never fully matched my experience in the vineyard.

The vintage doesn’t express itself as a single voice, it’s much more complicated than that. In a hot, dry year, you feel its force in every corner of the estate, while in a cooler, wetter one, the expression tightens, becomes quieter, more restrained, but no less specific. Each parcel, each pass, each lot bears a distinctive version of each of those stories. The job is to hear that clearly enough to know what deserves to stand alone, what belongs in the conversation, and what only makes sense after it’s introduced.

I have a single barrel of Chardonnay from the first pass in the vineyard, mostly free run, that I never intended to bottle on its own. But it earned that outcome. It’s delicate, but not slight, much lighter on the palate than I expected from such a hot vintage. It feels like a solo line played clearly enough to stand on its own. The next barrels are different. More press fraction, more second pick, less soloist than section. And they matter just as much, maybe more, because they open up the larger question of what each part is for.

That has become especially clear to me with Rouge Clair, our clairet that is rose adjacent. There, the point of the wine is not purity but coherence. It exists as a snapshot of the vineyard right between the end point of whites ripening and the early beginnings of reds coming in. A solely brighter, earlier expression of red fruit on its own can be vivid, but it can also spin off into something thin or one-dimensional. What some of the later white components bring are lower tones, a kind of bass note, enough grounding to give that brightness shape and dimension without dulling it.

Will that always be part of the wine? I don’t know. It shouldn’t be there by rule. It should only be there when it makes sense. But that has always been my instinct for this cuvée: not as a fixed formula, and not as a simple rosé made by choosing one block, harvesting it early, and calling it done, but as a place where different parts of the vineyard can meet at a specific moment in the season and say something fuller together than they could apart.

The same is true of Le P’tit Rouge. I don’t think of this wine as secondary. I think of it as a smaller movement within the same body of work. It lets me hear the estate at different moments. In Le P’tit Rouge’s case: what happens when red fruit is picked earlier, where is ripening in each of our blocks, what sort of shifts can we expect after a few more days, what another week brings into focus or pushes too far. Those differences are not academic. They change the tone of the wine, its tension, its movement, its usefulness in the larger picture. In that sense, these wines are closer to chamber music than a full on symphony. More contained, more exposed, but no less serious.

What I learn there doesn’t stay there. It feeds back into everything else: later picks, broader blends, parcel decisions, the larger statement the vintage is capable of making. The line between one wine and the next is never fixed. Brightness leans into weight. Early decisions press into later ones.

The best wines I’ve made have been blends. I say that reluctantly, because blending doesn’t belong to the current fashion of what’s considered exciting or pure today. It doesn’t romanticize the idea that individuality is sacred. And yet, it’s the blends that have had more to say.

Or maybe it’s just that the vineyard keeps revealing itself, regardless of fashion. Sometimes a wine can stand alone and still say less.