In the latest of our series of series of extended interviews with leading wine growers marking 20 years of The World of Fine Wine, Diana Snowden Seysses of Domaine Dujac in Burgundy and Snowden Vineyards in Napa Valley reflects on organic and biodynamic viticulture, natural wine, and coming to terms with the tragedy of climate change.
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A dual perspective
Diana Snowden Seysses: I moved to France in 2001 and became full-time here in 2003. I live here and spend three months in California. If the two harvests coincide, I drop Burgundy. It’s kind of messy, but I can pull it off because I am working with family on the one hand, and in-laws on the other.
It gives me this dual perspective: I get new ideas, fresh perspectives. I’m always missing something somewhere, and it’s a lot to balance. I recently saw Véronique [Boss-Drouhin]. She’s been traveling between Burgundy and Oregon for 40 years. I’ve been doing it for 20 years. And we were saying how hard it is, with the travel, the jetlag. But it’s also wonderful.
Vins de terroir
Diana Snowden Seysses: Burgundy was very early to start on the focus back on the vineyard, because we’re making vins de terroir that resonate with where they come from. So, there was an early shift toward vineyard work here, and that has permeated through the wine world. Just by looking you can see the vineyards aren’t hit by herbicide—it’s quite obvious now that it’s all organic-certified, keeping chemicals out of the vineyard.
At the technical end, Burgundy still hasn’t reached the UC Davis winemaking mindset. There’s a lot more faith in the raw materials and for nature to do something exciting. [But] if you go to the subject of climate change… the climate is changing faster than any living organism can adapt to, and we don’t have the same legal restrictions in California. There are so many ways to adapt to a change in climate that I think California will be able to do more nimbly than Burgundy. Changing spacing… irrigation… shade cloth is illegal in Burgundy. The idea of being able to put in irrigation lines in Burgundy… it’s not even worth asking the question. Everybody would have to agree—and to share the plumbing. Whether or not it’s ethical, it’s never going to happen.
Another major difference between California and Burgundy, is how you define ripe. In Napa, there is a general consensus that tends toward overripe—they’re waiting and waiting for phenolic maturity. I’m probably keeping an eye on my acidity—when that starts to go, that’s when I pick. That is more open for debate in Napa. If you decide to keep waiting, you’re going to accumulate a lot of sugar. There are ways of dealing with that, but a lot of those things just don’t resonate with me.
We can’t make wines like that anymore
Diana Snowden Seysses: Climate change was always on my radar—I’m from California, I’m green and eco-minded. But it didn’t take on an urgent dimension until 2017. We had a heatwave in California, and I saw temperatures in the vineyards go up to 42°C [108°F]. I’d never seen that in my life. It had real implications for the vintage. It was super-interesting, but after that trauma of watching that high heatwave, I flew back home to France, and thought, “Here I am… directly responsible,” and then three days later, the whole of the Napa Valley was on fire. And then I decided, it’s not only about how to adapt to the changing climate, but to be complicit with the Paris Agreement—it’s insane to be running a business that could be contributing to the end of our beautiful business.
One of the first things I did, back in 2017, was to take all of Jacques [Seysses]’s winemaking notes, and I plotted the harvest dates, sugar levels, and pHs back to the 1970s. They started picking on average in October. Now it’s early September; there was natural alcohol of 10; now it’s 14 or 15—all in a span of 50 years.
Honestly, my birth year is 1978, and every time I open a ’78, I inevitably cry. We cannot make wines like that anymore. The wine was so beautiful. The balance is not the same; the sugar, the acid, and the ripeness are not the same. There’s nothing to do about that—it’s lost. Young people can’t appreciate it—they don’t have access to 1978s, they don’t look for acidity the way we did. Especially if there’s no acid adjustment, wines now don’t have the acidity they had, and that’s something we have to mourn. But tastes change, and wines.
We were doing four punch-downs a day; now we do four in the whole cycle—we’ve really reduced extraction, because all that material is so much riper than it used to be. We don’t chaptalize anymore—we haven’t chaptalized for two years.
But I will moan about all of this, and then Jeremy [Seysse]’s parents will say, “You don’t know what it was like to watch rain fall on unripe grapes!” Burgundy has benefited from climate change. But [from the point of view of style], I would have stopped carbon dioxide accumulation in the mid-1990s.
In this journey of learning about climate change, I’ve accepted where we are—and that took a lot of emotional work; it’s the reason I started down this path I’m on. In 2017, I realized I was incredibly lucky to have these beautiful vineyards on one side, and marry into this family with fantastic holdings, and it dawned on me that I was luckier than my children, and luckier than anyone coming up in the wine industry. Part of making vins de terroir is this duty of preserving it for the next generations. I had many ups and downs. You start doing everything… from crunching your numbers on your own carbon footprint, to the life cycle of everything coming out of your home—it’s absolutely anxiety-producing.
I’ve mourned what we’ve lost, and in this moment, we still have varying shades of less good to fight for. But it could be much worse. We’ve lost the struggle to keep the global average increase in temperature to 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels—we missed the window. But the worst-case scenario is, statistically speaking, unlikely, and now we’re fighting for between 2.5°C and 4°C (4.5–7.2°F).
Capturing and reducing CO2
Diana Snowden Seysses: I asked Roger Boulton, the engineering professor at UC Davis in 2000, about how the CO2 emitted during fermentation is absorbed by the plant in the following season. Over the span of 20 years, he changed his position, and designed a prototype on paper to capture the CO2—there are 990,000ppm of CO2 in the headspace of a tank at the peak of fermentation. The chemical schema is there, and he’s working on it. You have it contained in one building, in one place.
But it’s a tiny little fraction of CO2 emissions. If you really want to get into it, you have to get into packaging, which isn’t really as sexy or exciting—the infrastructure on bottle use and bottle washing. 30 years ago, the bottle was washed and reused. In the meantime, Burgundy has fallen victim to marketing. Producers now have hundreds of different bottles and different weights. If we want to get to zero carbon, we’re going to have to reduce the number of bottle shapes and weights. We’re getting to work on this in different countries and understanding policy. It’s ridiculous—we can’t change the laws of physics, but we can change our habits when it comes to waste; we need to change the mindset of our clients.
Organic v biodynamic
Diana Snowden Seysses: My first experience of biodynamics was with Araujo Estate on the Eisele Vineyard in 2001. They had just converted to biodynamics, and they had just given me a sack of info, including a Wine Spectator interview with Leflaive, who I ended up interning with.
We transitioned to biodynamics [at Dujac] in 2002, and by 2008 all the vineyards were biodynamic; we were certified organic in 2012. The most important thing from an ecological standpoint is not putting chemicals in the earth. In Nuits-St-Georges, in St Helena—in all of these communities—the vineyards go right up to the elementary schools, so something like glyphosate, you can’t spray around growing children—for that reason alone, it’s unacceptable.
I can’t prove that biodynamics does anything, but we started a trial in 2013, where we got a small plot of Clos de la Roche, and managed it half biodynamic and half organic, running side by side since then. We’re not impartial, but we do taste blind, and we invariably find the biodynamic one always has a bit more acidity analytically speaking, and this kind of linear tension every year. That’s all I can say about it, above and beyond organics. One of the first things I did with my family [in California] was to pursue organic certification there. But I haven’t spoken a word about biodynamics to them—I don’t think I can impose that!
Into the woods
Diana Snowden Seysses: Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon was the lightbulb for me when it comes to the importance of forests. We’ve done a bunch of forest work, so our property [in California] is mostly forest, and after the 2020 fires, we looked at the forest with fresh eyes. We hadn’t been doing any forest maintenance; we had all these leaves and branches, like a bomb waiting to go off. We’ve applied for grants to get forest-fire ready, so you favor the big trees that keep more CO2.
In Burgundy, we have all these wonderful forests about us in Morey-St-Denis, and France used to be exemplary [on forest management], up until Sarkozy—now, not so much. We have 18ha [44 acres] at Domaine Dujac, and we do think we need to be really careful how we grow, because [as you get bigger] it becomes harder to manage fermentations. [But] buying vineyards in the Hautes-Côtes is smart—some vineyards there that were shrill are now ripe.
Chapters of change
Diana Snowden Seysses: Over the past 20 years, I’ve seen different chapters. This shift in awareness and emphasis, and imaginative creative thinking back to the vineyards, has been happening gradually. I witnessed a battle of the definition of ripeness, and that absolutely hit me at the core—I had to pick a side. I guess now, I see these more current battles over something like natural wine with a much more philosophical perspective—while I suffered with the ripeness “wars,” I feel dispassionate about the “natural wine debate.” I think it’s been a positive player in the wine conversation, in that it has brought in young people and has the right core values.
Right now, we’re at a crossroads. There are equal reasons to lament what we have lost, and to be excited about the opportunities that remain for the future—I feel both at all times. I feel acutely the pain of a system that is broken, but see that there are still opportunities to change.
