Red and white might as well be the north and south poles of wine, reliably serving as stable orientation hubs on the vast and often confusing surface of planet Vino. Wine shops, wine lists and wine books all tend to organize themselves around these binary reference stations. So pervasive is the red/white divide that we scarcely give a thought as to why we insist on conceptualizing wine by way of this rather confining scheme. It wasn’t always so.
We would have to go back a long way indeed to have an idea of just when the mutation that gave us the white grape popped up (it’s the darker-hued fruit of the vine that has the priority in terms of time). But this hardly mattered in the earliest days, since our ancestors were so delighted with the magical properties of yeast fermentation that they would throw anything into a pot that might result in the production of alcohol — vine or tree fruit, berries, honey, tree sap, etc. Only very gradually did refinements set in and our promiscuous neolithic cocktail morph into a beverage made exclusively with grapes.
By the time we get to our old friend Pliny the Elder, and the section of his encyclopedic first century C.E. natural history that deals with the vine, red and white grapes and their resulting wines are clearly differentiated. But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that they were not frequently found growing together (the old French phrase for this planting approach is en foule, ‘ in a crowd’), and made into wine that made good use of what each had to contribute. The technique is by no means obsolete. We describe wines made this very traditional way as field blends.
Mashups of red and white aren’t confined to what we might call farm wine, however. A number of important, prestige appellations permit it. The traditional Champagne recipe, for example, calls for two red grapes (Pinot Noir and PInot Meunier) to be blended with Chardonnay. In the southern Rhône Valley, Châteauneuf du Pape rouge may include Grenache Blanc, Bourboulenc, Clairette and Roussanne (all whites); in the north, the reds of l’Ermitage and Saint-Joseph permit modest amounts of local white varieties Marsanne and Roussanne, while in neighboring Côte Rôtie, Viognier may be added. Up to 10% of specified white grapes are permitted in Chianti.
Since mixing in a bit of white fruit serves to lighten and freshen wines made predominantly from red grapes, it may be that one way winemakers could mitigate the effects of global warming on their red wines would be by relying a bit more on additions of white varietals where permitted.
Meanwhile, both rosé and orange (skin-macerated white wines) are reaching wider audiences with their cross-dressing character, underscoring the fact that white and red have never quite been the utterly oppositional pair we’ve made them out to be, and highlighting a relationship that has always been and remains — shall we say — fluid.
-Stephen Meuse