New wines from old vines
There's growing recognition of the importance of old vines – and they're key to some of the most exciting wines today. Plus: what else I've been drinking recently
Check out my podcast with my friend, Daily Telegraph wine critic Victoria Moore: Think pink! We discuss how and why rosé wine has got so big – but has pale Provence rosé jumped the shark now? Find out on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
It felt like time travel. After 45-minutes bumping along dirt roads that petered out in forest, I stood in a plot of ungrafted Carignan bush vines planted in 1910. Could the seedlings that became their thick, knarled trunks really have been planted when my grandmother was still a young girl? Yes, said winemaker Derek Mossman Knapp, because the plot and its vines are named in a legal dispute from the time. Here in Maule, central Chile, many very old vines thrive still, especially Carignan: Mossman Knapp’s Garage Wine Co is one of their champions. But, he asks, “Do old vines make wonderful wine because they’re old, or are they old because they make great wine?”
That is one of the key puzzles to this phenomenon attracting such attention in recent years. For decades, very old vines have survived in places including Maule, and in Aragón, Jumilla and elsewhere in Spain, and in South Africa’s Swartland, simply because the land was too poor and too cheap for them to be worth replanting with anything else. Maria Dugnol of Juan Gil, in Jumilla, explains that in her broiling-hot corner of Mediterranean Spain, only pines, olive trees and Monastrell vines can grow unirrigated. Water rights cost three times as much as land: if farmers tore up the vines and planted fruit trees, the irrigation would make them uneconomic.
Elsewhere, especially in Spain, very old plots of vines have grown abandoned for years. When their owners in depopulated corners of España vaciada (“emptied Spain”) got too old to work the land, there was no-one else to take over, their children having moved to the cities. I wrote recently about pioneering Sierra de Gredos winemakers Comando G: founder Dani Landi recalls spending days on end driving around back roads in the area, seeking out overgrown Garnacha plots abandoned in the 1970s. Back then, Garnacha was regarded as a grape only fit for making bulk wines – much as Carignan once was in Maule and in the Languedoc.
Californian winemaker Michael Cooper is looking for similar old-vine magic in the high Sierra de Moncayo of Aragón, seeking out promising plots of knarled Garnacha. Meanwhile in Valdeorras, Galicia, Teresa López and Luis Peique of Adega o Cabalin farm a patchwork of tiny plots of local-grape vines up to 100 years old. And Swartland guru Eben Sadie spent ten years in the Garnacha country of Priorat, Catalonia, before returning to South Africa and tracking down parcels of 40 to 70 year-old dry-farmed Mourvèdre, Grenache, Carignan and other bush vines for his now-iconic wines.
There is some irony in these, all new-wave producers in their respective regions, making some of the buzziest new wines from such old, once-scorned vines. Which brings us back to Mossman Knapp’s question: do old vines make interesting wine because of their age, or did they always?
Old vines can make particularly good wine because the juice from their grapes is more concentrated: they produce far fewer grapes. This fall in yields over time is why, as Sarah Abbott MW pointed out at this week’s Old Vine Conference tasting in London, oenology schools traditionally taught that vines were a 25-year crop. Growers then simply replanted them before their yields became uneconomic – a process you can still see happening, for example, in vineyards in Burgundy. These old vines’ wines can sometimes appear almost rustic, in a good way; reds can have a bloody character to their concentration and intensity.
But at the same time, it’s hard to argue that many of these old vines always made great wine. Winemaking techniques have improved enormously since, for instance, Silvia Marrao’s Mencía vines were planted in Bierzo. The farmers she leases these plots off are vague about their age, she says – “Oh, my grandfather planted them” – but there seems little doubt that the wine that Grandpa made from their grapes in the 1940s would have been fairly rustic stuff.
Old vines survive in part because they are hardy: their roots go much deeper than those of younger vines, especially in poor soils, making them more resistant to drought. “You can treat them more like a 4x4,” says Mossman Knapp. But they also offer crucial insights into sustainability. “Have they survived because of the farming culture of the people that looked after them?” he asks. “The old plant is actually more resilient because it has a memory of less pampered times” – before the advent of drip irrigation, now the norm elsewhere in Chile. This is the process of epigenetics, where a vine’s environment alters its gene expression, without changing its DNA, so that vines “remember” past stresses such as drought or heat, allowing them to adapt to be more resilient.
If old vines are now often prized in a way they once were not, how to nurture them? Part of that task is mapping where the oldest vines are grown. Since 2021, the Old Vine Conference, a non-profit organisation, has been compiling a Global Old Vine Registry which already includes more than 10,000 vineyards worldwide. It holds regular meetings – and this week’s London trade tasting – to bring together growers of old wines. The Conference’s cut-off point for “old” is 35 years. This age is also the criteria for the Barossa Old Vine Charter, which has performed a similar task since 2009. The iconic Australian region boasts a treasure trove of very old vines, as it has never been afflicted by the phylloxera parasite which wiped out so many European vineyards in the late nineteenth century.
But the Barossa Charter’s criteria for the oldest group of “Ancestor vines” is those of more than 125 years of age. And at leading producer Torbreck, some of their Mataro (Mourvèdre) and Grenache bush vines are up to 175 years old. In London recently, chief winemaker Ian Hongell explained how Torbreck uses layering to replace gaps in the vineyard with genetically identical vines, by burying a cane from a healthy “mother vine” until it develops its own root system and creates a new vine. Elsewhere, owners of old vines use massal selection, taking cuttings from old vines to plant new ones, thereby preserving genetic material. At Magoutes, in north-west Greece, Dimitris Diamantis uses this method to keep his old Xinomavro vines’ biotypes and their adaptations to the harsh mountain environment.
Beyond the technical aspects, however, there is for me a simpler magic to wines from these old plots. Growing grapes is as important as any other part of the winemaking heritage – indeed more so, to the extent that it shapes the landscapes of so many wine regions. Whether on the slopes of Burgundy or in the crazily steep vineyards of Ribeira Sacra, Galicia, in the moonscape old-vine plots of Lanzarote or in that patch of light-green vine leaves in the middle of the trees in Maule, the vines make the land in these places what it is. Their wines’ magic stems, in significant part, from their connection to a particular place.
This kind of very specific provenance is something that many consumers increasingly seek out in food and drink: to that extent, nurturing old vines is good business. But they are beautiful too, their wood twisted and cracked into natural sculpture by the years (you can see some extraordinary photos in the Old Vine Conference’s 2026 photography competition, including the Italian picture above.) For me, wines from such vines make you stop and think of time – of the generations of growers who tended the landscape, and of the vines themselves, reawakened each spring, getting more knarled each year as their owners struggled, prospered, raised families, fought wars and passed away. And yet still today they give us refreshment and wonder.
Five old-vine wines to try
Garage Wine Co. “Old Vine Pale” Truquilemu Vineyard 2022, Maule - this unusual rosé is made from 75 year-old Mataro and Cariñena (Carignan) vines. Fresh, expressive, crunchy red fruit, herbal notes and bit of weight. A serious rosé (VINUM, Wine Direct, £21.)
Domaine de Tourelles “SKIN” 2023, Bekaa Valley - this leading Lebanese producer makes this unusual orange wine from 150 year-old Merweh vines, a local white grape: the pressed grapes have three months skin contact with the wine, though it’s still a fairly subtle orange wine. Brimming with delicate orange blossom, gentle grip and a touch of minerality (All About Wine, Harris & Co, Penistone Wine Cellars and elsewhere, from £17.69.)
Juan Gil Silver Label 2023, Murcia – made from fruit from 40 year-old Monastrell vines, this is a powerful red with rich, sweet fruit and a generous lick of oak (Rannoch Scott Wines, Hedley Wright, NYWines, from £18.69.)
Virgen de Galir “Los Carismaticos” 2021, Valdeorras – this red wine from Galicia is made in tiny quantities (just 1,500 bottles a year on average) from a single, 0.3ha parcel of Merenzao vines over 50 years old. Merenzao is the local name for what the French call Trousseau, or what is known more expressively elsewhere in Spain and Portugal as Bastardo. Pale, fresh, light, grippy, complex (AG Wines, Martin & Malthouse, from £35.95, though I drank by the glass at 67 Pall Mall.)
Quinta da Corte “Princesa” Reserva 2021, Douro – from vines over 50 years old, this is a field blend of Tinta Barrica, Touriga Nacional and other red grapes: plush, sweet, rich fruit with generous but well-integrated oak, big but still nicely balanced (Fine Wines Direct, £29.99.)
What I’ve been drinking recently
Domaine Maby “La Fermade” Blanc 2023, Lirac – Lirac is best known as a source of big, good-value southern-Rhône reds, made almost in sight of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, on the other side of the river. But they do make whites too, and very decent they can be – like this one. It’s a blend of Grenache Blanc, Clairette and Picpoul: fresh, sweet fruit, citrus and a touch of minerality, with a bit of weight too. Nice balance – a lovely white Rhône (Vin Neuf, £17.95. The Wine Society and Yapp have the 2025, from £14.95)
Domaine Tempier rosé 2023, Bandol – if you’ve listened to my latest podcast (you haven’t yet?!) you’ll have heard Victoria and me wishing that people spent the money they’re prepared to blow on Whispering Angel on a bottle of serious Provence rosé. We mean one like this, indeed arguably the best such rosé, from a famous producer. Made from roughly half Mourvèdre and the balance Grenache and Cinsault, it’s quite a deep pink, unfashionably so for Provence; a beautiful depth of fruit, weight and complexity and balance. Just all-round fabulous wine (quite widely available; from £36.)
Maras Xinomavro 2023, Naoussa – a classic example of northern Greece’s greatest red grape: herbal and savoury notes and sweet red fruit, underpinned by firm but well-balanced tannins (Maltby & Greek, £24.)
Great read, thanks. Genuinely illuminating.