For many people, the notion of how wine is made boils down to something like this: there exists a discrete plot of vines from which an individual winemaker annually harvests a crop of one variety of grapes – Malbec or Chenin Blanc, say. The fruit goes into the winemaker’s own cellar, where it is crushed, fermented and matured, then bottled and sold under the property’s label. It often happens this way, of course – but it’s really the barest sketch of how things are really done; a kind of child’s picture-book version of the process.
In reality, most wine properties have a diversity of fruit sources. More than one variety may be planted, or a single variety may be planted in various plots each with a somewhat different exposition, soil type, altitude, etc. These plots might be contiguous, but are equally likely to be scattered here and there. Vintners may purchase fruit to add to their own stocks; or they may sell some off to someone else.
In any event, most winemakers will end up working with distinct lots of raw material, each having different characteristics and potential. When this is the case, the tendency today is to vinify each lot separately and later combine them in some proportion. You can almost think of them as ingredients. Blending them takes advantage of their diversity to make something more appealing than any one lot could be on its own.
Whether built from raw materials a winemaker considers homogenous (single varietal, single site) or heterogenous, a deliberately individuated wine is often referred to as a cuvée (koo-VAY), from the French word cuve (koov), or vat. To distinguish one cuvée from another, an estate will, in addition to its name (Château Rigamarole, for example) often attach a distinguishing fantasy name — Cuvée Grand-Père, say — for a creation utilizing fruit from the property’s oldest vines.
Perhaps the most straightforward way of grasping the concept is to think of a cuvée as a single realized wine idea among multiple possible alternatives, each of which could make use of the assets at hand.
How is it accomplished? The process of creating a cuvée by trial and error is known, en Français, as assemblage (ah-som-BLAHJ), as pictured in photo at top.
Quite enough French for you for one day? Moi, aussi!