The satisfaction of making wine the hard way

Spectator

30-04-2025

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of 'simmering insanity', reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn't have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn's Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs.
Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back of a London taxi. He decided to give up the rat race and bought a neglected Vouvray domaine, where he moved with his family to live la belle vie.
So far, so conventional. In some parts of France you can't throw a grape without hitting a burnout Anglophone tycoon turned gentleman farmer. Hahn, however, decided to do things the hard way, from pruning the vines to making the wine as much as possible by hand. He and his French wife Juliette sometimes take this to extremes: rather than a modern wine press, they use a century-old wood and cast iron one that needs painstaking loading and cleaning out with pitchforks. Here's a man who likes the ancient ways: even when hosting a raclette party, he spurns the modern electric cheese heater for a candle-powered device.
The book takes the form of an almanac outlining the seasonal work at the domaine, starting in winter and finishing with the vendage in the autumn.