Is it true that old vineyards make better wine than young ones?

If you are given the choice between two wines and all you know is that one is from young vines and the other is from old vines, which would you choose? Wines made from old vines attract attention because they come from vines that can be older than the oldest person at the table. The age of the vineyard may lead one to assume that the wine must be of high quality, but the fact that it is made from an old vineyard does not mean that the wine always has to be good.

The main value of old vines is their genetic diversity, which allows us to rescue forgotten varieties and helps us learn how to better resist the onslaught of climate change due to their resilience. They also represent a landscape, romantic and historical heritage, while the resulting wine happens like with people: its quality will depend greatly on how the vine has reached old age, as was concluded at the recent Barcelona Wine Week (BWW), which this year had old vine wine as its protagonist.

First, it should be clarified what is meant by an old vineyard. According to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), it is one that is officially documented to be 35 years old or older. However, the DOQ Priorat considers an old vineyard to be one that is more than 75 years old or planted before 1945. There are even two-hundred-year-old vineyards in the Canary Islands, which were spared from the phylloxera that devastated the vineyards at the end of the 19th century. They are planted ungrafted, directly in the ground, without grafting them with American rootstock, the obligatory resource even today to stop the proliferation of the insect. The only ones that are ungrafted on the Peninsula are the old vineyards on sandy soils, which also stop phylloxera.

The value of old vineyards

Old vines are an open book that tells us about resistance to adversity and connects us with the knowledge that winegrowers of yesteryear had. At the same time, over the years they can become less productive and provide more concentrated wines, which can make them difficult to pay off and hence they have often been abandoned. Professor of viticulture at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), José Ramon Lissarrague, believes that old vineyards "can potentially produce very good wines", but so can young ones, so their relevance is more social: "They are part of our life, history and landscape."

Its genetic richness is one of its main assets, but there is one detail that cannot be overlooked, warns oenologist Sara Pérez of the Mas Martinet (DOQ Priorat) and Venus la Universal (DO Montsant) wineries: previously, winegrowers made mass selection, that is, they selected the best strains to replant and, therefore, almost all those planted are more or less the same. "In fifty years, we may have a vineyard that is a hundred years old, but it is clonal, which is not the same as the value that an old vine has today," Pérez stresses.

Hence, today's old vineyards are a first-rate asset. "We can learn a lot from old vineyards," says the winemaker. They provide greater homogeneity in the quality of the wines year after year, because they are well adapted to their environment and are less sensitive to climate variability. This is due to the fact that they tend to have deeper roots, which allows them to access water reserves underground, but the persistent drought has shaken this resilience. In Priorat, many vines have died, "when old vines had never died before," Pérez points out. The oldest vineyard wine that Pérez makes today is the red Camino Pesseroles, whose Carignan grape was planted in 1939.

Wineries that produce wines

The El Grifo winery in Lanzarote has some bicentennial vineyards of muscatel of Alexandria in chabocos of volcanic origin, with which they make the sweet Moscatel de Ana and a orange. El Grifo's winemaker, Elisa Ludeña, claims that, in addition to being pre-phylloxera strains, they have resisted a very scarce water regime, an average of 150 liters per year, and that the chabocos to plant them: it is a crack left by the passage of lava and where more organic matter is concentrated, which helps the vine to access food. "It has been accustomed to the climate system where it has been planted for so many years that it is more resistant than a new one," he says.

The Javier Sanz Viticultor winery in Rueda (Valladolid) has the Finca Saltamontes, a pre-phylloxera vineyard registered in 1863, but which could be older. Among the findings, white grapes Verdejo and other unique strains, such as the red variety CinderellaFor him, the value of old vines is genetics. "If we lose that heritage, we will lose it forever," he warns, and recalls that mass selection has been so lost "that now all wines are the same; they have the same genetics." Old varieties can also provide wines with a lower alcohol content, a characteristic that was despised in the past and desired today, and Sanz calls on young people to recover them.

In Catalonia, the oldest vineyard is probably Vinyet, cultivated by the Lagravera winery in Alfarràs (Segrià). It is a vineyard dating back to 1889, where 24 varieties have been planted, three of which are unique in the world and are currently known as X8, X Avi 1997 and X Avi 2167. The La Pell collection of wines is produced from this vineyard. "What is special about our 1889 vineyard is not only its age, but also its enormous genetic diversity. If it had been uprooted, three varieties would have already been lost," stresses the oenologist and general manager of Lagravera, Pilar Salillas.

Sometimes it takes a while for a winery to release a wine that highlights the virtues of an old vineyard. The LaFou winery (DO Terra Alta) has released LaFou de Ramos 2018, a wine that is bottled from a 1966 white Grenache vineyard. Its owner and winemaker, Ramon Roqueta, highlights that the old vineyard provides more complexity and less variability from vintage to vintage because it is adapted to the environment. "Age is simply another ingredient: if the vineyard is not well adapted, it will never produce a good wine, no matter how old it is," he says.

Christian Barbier, from the Barbier family of Clos Mogador (DOQ Priorat), has the Deunidó project of his own wines, with which he has participated in the Liquid Vins fair, one of those that coincides with the BWW. Now he has released a Macabeo from a ninety-year-old vineyard located at 1,100 metres, in Daroca (Zaragoza). He collaborates with the Association for the Recovery of the Vineyard and Viticultural Tradition of the Jiloca Valley to prevent old vineyards from being torn up, which are an opportunity for young winegrowers. "If you adopt, rent or buy a property, the next day it is already producing for you," he points out, and you can obtain wines "of supreme quality," with the added bonus that there is a land untouched by herbicides. "Everything remains to be done, but there has to be someone who goes nowhere," he stresses.