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It’s one of the remarks you can make about a wine that the winemaker will never dispute: "lovely complexity", you can say, and the maker will nod enthusiastically, visibly impressed by your taste and discernment.
If you remark on the beauty and intelligence of their child/dog you will get the same reaction. But what is complexity in wine? And where does it come from?
You could also say of a complex wine that it has layers of flavor, that it develops on the palate. A complex wine doesn't just have one flavor all the way through: it starts off one way, then different notes emerge on the mid-palate and on the finish. It's the main reason, apart from alcohol, why wine is more interesting than fruit juice.
But not all wine is complex. Great wine is complex, good wine is complex, simple wine probably isn't. And overoaked, over-alcoholic wine in a bottle so heavy you risk a shoulder injury by lifting it? Frequently not. In fact, if a winemaker assures me that the wine I'm about to taste is "really, really complex", warning bells ring. What they call "complex", I probably call "trying too hard".
Balance and control
Mark Savage MW of UK merchant Savage Selections puts it more elegantly: balance is everything, he says. "An obsession with complexity can lead to practices that upset balance, for example overextraction. We see winemakers who seem to think that they will make their wines more complex by extracting everything possible out of the grape, who forget that the skill of winemaking lies in extracting what you want from it, not everything that is there."
More of everything does not equal more complexity, it just equals more noise. Savage's warning bells ring when he reads, under "extraction" on a Bordeaux château’s technical sheet, "le maximum possible". Of course there might appear to be a logic to maximum extraction. Surely you express the terroir most fully by extracting everything there is in the grapes? Only if you think that shouting equals articulacy.
He points, crucially, to two kinds of complexity: that which comes from the vineyard, and that acquired in the cellar. They are not mutually exclusive, though the latter can obscure the former. Champagne, for example: its character, its complexity, comes largely from the aging process, but there is built-in complexity too from the blend of wines, grapes and vineyards. When Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, chef de cave of Roederer, talks about wanting flavor to come in waves on the palate, that's about blending different vineyard components in the base wine. The cellar elements – the action of lees (and this is a huge subject in itself), the effects of dosage and the effects of aging – are on top of that.
Champagne's supernova
We've started on Champagne, so let's continue. It's the best argument around for the importance of different vineyards, different terroirs, different grape varieties, adding up to complexity. The big houses have for years defined Champagne as something that must balance the acidity of one site with the roundness of another, and the elegance of Chardonnay with the structure of Pinot Noir. It works; great Champagne has seemingly endless complexity and fascination. Krug, for example, has more than 150 different components in the blend, each contributing a detail to a precisely drawn picture.
Take some of the possible components in a blend away, and complexity becomes more elusive. Blanc de Blancs Champagne is seldom as complex as one that includes both black and white grapes, though it may have other charms. Single-vineyard Champagnes are rare, and sometimes it's difficult to see past the glamor of an exalted price or extreme rarity; Philipponat's Clos des Goisses is a standout, Krug’s Clos de Mesnil or d'Ambonnay the priciest. Growers make more single-vineyard wines than houses do, but still not that many. It's hard to refute the idea that complexity here, and balance too, is (almost always) based on lots of different components.
So what of Champagne's polar opposite in this respect, the Côte d'Or? One grape variety per color, and single parcels that might amount to only a few rows of vines – yet wines with singing complexity and precision. If lots of different components give complexity, how does one explain a Côte d'Or Grand Cru?
It comes down to our old friend terroir, of course. Great terroir gives better, more complex flavors than run-of-the-mill terroir, and there is no avoiding that fact, however mysterious the effects of terroir might seem. The most complex wines come from the best terroirs; the best terroirs have the capacity to produce the best, most complex wines.
Digging in the dirt
The Côte d'Or has some of the most remarkable terroirs in the world, and some of the most accurately defined. That definition might be informal rather than legal: any good Burgundian winemaker knows precisely where quality and style might change in his already small plots of vines, from one end of a row to another, perhaps. Louis-Michel Liger-Belair, producer of ultra-defined reds at Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair, points to the detail applied to every plot: "We try to be perfect in every vineyard, but it is a different perfection in each." All those decisions in the vineyard – leaf-plucking or shading, leaving the shoots longer or cutting them shorter – are made small parcel by small parcel. "Different vineyard management during the year [in each plot] and different winemaking equals more complexity."
He won't have an optical sorting table because they produce uniformity: only grapes which fit pre-set parameters are allowed through. Instead he spends each harvest on the sorting table. "It is important for me to see every single grape that goes in. I see the vineyard during the year, but the sorting table is the last understanding of what I have to do in the winemaking. That process starts in April, but I make the final decision when I see the grapes on the sorting table."
He does some whole-cluster fermentation, and every cluster is individually selected for that. Then, in the cellar, "there are 40 small decisions every year which are different for each vineyard".
But there are two big factors in complexity which we haven't yet touched on, or only briefly. One is grape variety, and the other is yeast. And you can't have wine without either. You might have noticed that.
Some grape varieties are intrinsically more complex than others. Pinot Noir is intrinsically more complex than Gamay, which is probably one reason, as well as the latter's lesser suitability to the Côte d'Or, for all those grand ducal edicts over the years banning Gamay from those vineyards. Riesling is (I would suggest) intrinsically more complex than Grüner Veltliner, with a greater range of terpenes and other flavor components, all of which react subtly differently in different terroirs and to different cellar treatment. Sauvignon Blanc is generally not very complex at all, which might be why it's so popular.
Pinot Noir is also genetically very varied, and prone to mutation. Liger-Belair reckons that a vineyard planted with massal selections of Pinot, which all ripen at slightly different moments and have slightly different characteristics, will give more complexity of flavor than one planted with a couple of clones, but with this proviso: "Clones change their style after 30 or 40 years." They adapt, in other words, and become less clone-like. But that only happens with time. In his Oregon operation, Rose & Arrow, which is planted with clones, "we're not yet getting the same complexity. They're still young vines."
Behind the mask
Of course, you can take a not-very-complex grape from an indifferent terroir and sex it up in the cellar with a bit of oak, a bit of lees-stirring and a bit of malolactic: all these things will give more complexity. They might also, if they're overdone, overpower the wine. At a tasting of Hungarian Furmints in London last February, too many wines had been covered with oak, and the excuse of the winemaker was always the same: to make the wine more complex. Most of those wines could be filed under Trying Too Hard. We're back to Mark Savage's point, that balance, and not interfering with the character of the fruit, is far more important than striving for forced complexity. I might also quote (I often do) consultant Alberto Antonini's point that for winemakers to give their best wines the most oak is illogical; they're made from the best grapes, and need the least oak.
We've left yeasts until last, although they are the main reason why wine doesn't taste of grapes. The standard, safety-first approach is to knock out wild yeasts with a dose of sulfur, then ferment with a laboratory yeast designed to give you reliable results every time – no stuck fermentations, no funny flavors. You can see the attraction. There are neutral yeasts, which have the least effect on flavor; there are aromatic yeasts, which can give some very in-your-face lime or peach notes; and there are those wild yeasts, an ungoverned crew with no idea of teamwork, with different strains every year, and with unpredictable results. It’s a brave winemaker who hires them.
Or a winemaker who is focused on terroir, and on keeping every nuance of terroir in the wine – which, in a good terroir, adds up to more complexity. The reason is that the population of yeasts on grapeskins varies in each year – damp conditions will favor some strains, dry conditions others – and varies from vineyard to vineyard, too. It’s possible that a yeast population, even allowing for these annual variations, is so specific to a vineyard that it can be used as a marker for that vineyard.
All these wild yeasts do different things. Some will be active at the start of fermentation, some in the middle, and some will not kick in until the end. Does this sound like more complexity? It tastes like it, certainly. It’s not the complexity of lees-stirring or oak, which is impossible to miss; this complexity is more subtle. It gives you less-obvious fruit flavor, but more detail. It's the sort of detail that is lost, or not even attempted, in those trying-too-hard wines.
And that's another fail-safe comment, by the way, when the winemaker is looking at you expectantly and you're keeping the wine in your mouth for as long as possible while you try and think of what to say. "Very detailed."
Keep it for the best wines, though. And that means the most balanced and complex; not the biggest.
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The Simple Truth about Complexity in Wine - Wine-Searcher
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