Francisco Carrau comes from a long line of winemakers: He was born into a family that had been making wine in Catalonia since 1752. His grandfather emigrated to Uruguay in 1929 and built the family winery in Canelones. Carrau grew up there, spending his childhood in the cellar and vineyards with his father—Quico Carrau Pujol, a renowned winemaker himself—so his progression into the profession was a natural one.
While Carrau’s feet and hands have always been firmly planted in winemaking, his head is very much focused on the science behind it. At the age of 18, he started working in the winery laboratory, doing all the analyses. He delved even deeper into the chemistry of wine through his studies and PhD in wine-flavor chemistry. Since then, he has dedicated his life to research projects that have had an important impact on the Uruguayan wine industry, as well as on the wider world of wine.
One of Carrau’s first topics of research was grape yeast, a project he started in 1985 at the age of 24 and that continues to this day. “I started a yeast laboratory in my father’s winery,” he explains. The experiments led to separating and creating selections of their own native yeasts for white-, red-, and sparkling-wine production—a first in Uruguay.
When these yeast experiments started to get really interesting, though, was through Carrau’s work with non-Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast. “Saccharomyces yeasts make up 95% of the world’s commercial yeasts, which make fermentation possible in wine, as well as bread and beer,” he explains. “However, from 1995, when I started working at Montevideo’s University of the Republic [where he is head professor], we began focusing on non-Saccharomyces yeasts.” Those are much harder to work with but can yield superior and more complex results.
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In particular, Carrau and his team isolated a special yeast strain from his Tannat vineyards, Hanseniaspora vineae. He shared this yeast strain with international colleagues, and it is now available as a commercial yeast worldwide. “It gives a lot more aromatic complexity,” he explains, “and quite notably, the wines develop more of a floral character.”
Carrau, Tannat, and sustainability
Beyond wine ferments, Carrau has also been using yeasts in the vineyard as a sustainable alternative to fungicides. It is also in the vineyard that he has focused most of his work with Tannat—in rescuing the pre-phylloxera old-vine material Uruguay still has. “We didn’t want to lose this patrimony, so we sought out clones of the old vines,” he says, reflecting on a time when most Uruguayan producers were ripping out older vines and replanting with new clones. “We have kept a big collection of these in Cerro Chapeu [the family winery, in Rivera].”
With another colleague from Italy, Carrau carried out the world’s first full commercial genome sequencing of a Vitis vinifera grape variety, specifically on Tannat. “It was the first sequencing of a grapevine being used in a vineyard, rather than in a laboratory,” he adds. “It allowed us to identify where the grape grew best in different parts of Uruguay”—that is, the ideal conditions, based on soils, climate, and exposure—“by looking at the chemical composition.”
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Although Tannat is very much his forte, Carrau also made waves by producing Uruguay’s first Petit Manseng and, more recently, Manseng Noir—an almost obsolete Basque relative of Tannat, which is yielding promising results. Designed by Carrau himself, the Cerro Chapeu winery offers a host of innovative wines today—from pet nat and orange wine, to red Tannat fermented on the white skins of Petit Manseng, and juicy, carbonic-maceration Arinarnoa—putting it at the forefront of Uruguay’s increasingly diverse wine scene.
Ever curious to explore and to investigate, Francisco Carrau continues to use his scientific experience and expertise to elevate the wines of Uruguay.
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