What is ‘genetic diversity’ in vines?

Fun sheep infographics, and what the hell ‘massale’ actually means

Dolly the sheep, who never lived to learn that clones were getting a bad name

It’s hard to read far into most descriptions of high-minded wines without bumping into ‘massale selection’. It’s one of those terms that, unless you’re deeply into viticulture, probably prompts one of those split-second moments of foggy annoyance. I get this is meant to be good, you think, and it signifies some kind of seriousness…a sort of ‘Heritage Breed’ of wine..but what the hell does it mean, and why does it matter?*

I spoke to Jean-Baptise Lécaillon of Louis Roederer last year about the house’s long-running project to preserve historic vine material. As with most conversations with Jean-Baptiste, I came away with a semi-blown mind….but the essence, echoed in other houses with younger programmes such as Moët et Chandon, is that Champagne’s vineyard is suffering from a lack of genetic diversity.

“Twenty five years ago, everyone was thinking about new varieties, new breedings, resistant varietals…it took some time for me at the CIVC, as President of the technical committee, to say, “we should not forget this massale idea”…

Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Chef de Cave of Louis Roederer

To understand what a massale selection is, we have to go back to the first period of replanting after phylloxera (documented here for Champagne):

How Texas Saved Champagne

And, because of Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, I thought we’d do the whole thing in sheep.

Phase one - ‘pre-clonal’. A group of diverse individuals, where genetic pools stay more localised.

Imagine this is a subregion of Champagne in 1950. This jolly band of colourful sheep stays within its local area, cared by nearby farmers and small breeders. When farmers need more of their favourite sheep, they’re not going to a central Champagne Sheep Supermarket and placing an order for the same variety as a grower on the other side of the region.

“Massale selection’ for vines means selecting wood from the vineyard to propagate. In pre-clonal Champagne, the end result was that the Pinot Noir vines of one village could end up subtly different from those in a neighbouring village, which had developed very slightly differently over time through its own propagation programmes. Even within a village, there could be significant variation.

Phase two - the ‘clonal’ period. Nurseries select the highest performing genetic specimens, codify them and sell them ready-grafted to growers.

The clonal landscape - large quantities of lower genetic diversity, with a little (just the bottom row) left of pre-clonal material

The logical next step here is to hunt amongst all this developing expertise for genetic specimens that growers really want. This means, for the champagne of the 1970s in its heady days of chemically-boosted viticulture, meant high yields, easy viticulture and early ripening.

Large nurseries that serve whole regions grew during the second half of the 20th Century, selling these selections (which were developed in conjunction with the regions they were from, hence ‘Burgundy clone’ Chardonnay, for example') to growers on the promise of better profitability and reliability.

‘Clones’, then, are codified, numbered centralised selections that are shown to have specific properties. It’s important to point out, too, that many of the world’s greatest wines (and some very grand champagnes indeed) are made with clonal selections, and it’s absolutely not the case that they are always inferior. Vineyard conditions, vine age and viticulture modify clone behaviour significantly.

Today, though, questions arise. Do we want the same thing - high yields and early ripening - as the growers of the 1970s? Not always. But, further than that, is there a risk to the health of the vineyard in having lost all that genetic diversity?

Phase three - the massale revival

Where pre-clonal vineyards survive, genetics which don’t exist in the clonal system also survive.

That material is usually lower-yielding than modern clonal selections. It’s not just that, though - they’re plants that growers have observed growing in balance, producing the right sort of grapes for the wines they make, toughing out difficult seasons where traditional clonal selections might struggle.

If your estate happens to have some of these specimens, you’ll get to know them, one-by-one, by working the vineyards (if you spend enough time in them). There might be a few vines in one corner of a vineyard that show especially compact bunches and small berries that suit red wine production for sparkling rosé, for example, so you’ll take some wood from them and get it grafted to replant for a block for red wine.

But if you find some vines that offer up beautifully balanced grapes for sparkling, don’t seem prone to disease and remain regular in yield and flavour, how do you know it’s down to its genetics and not just the particular place it’s in? Is its character translatable?

The future - formalising the massale process…and coming (at least partly) full circle?

Taking sheep 51 to 60, and spreading them out in smaller quantities…

This is where trialling comes in. Cue projects like Roederer’s In Vinifera Aeternitas, or the younger Moët ‘Essentia’ project. After a selection is checked for genetic stability and hygiene (being clear of virus), it needs to be grown, tested and understood in control conditions. They also need to be protected from virus and diseases themselves, which is why the CIVC’s ‘Quanopée’ project is hermetically sealed against insect ingress, and why Roederer’s nursery is in a geographically-isolated spot in the village of Bouleuse.

Here’s Lécaillon again:

“Then we start to understand what [these selections'] are, Budbreak, flowering, ripening, rot sensitivity…what we found is that from the earliest to the latest, there is fifteen days’ difference to reach 10.5% alcohol, planted in the same plot in the same nursery, in the same conditions, on the same rootstock”.

In other words, these original Pinot Noirs - the bottom row of sheep in my graphic - are so diverse that the latest-ripening are over two weeks later to mature than the earliest. That means later to flower, later to ripen, later to everything.

With everybody wanting to stretch the growing season thanks to climate change’s efforts to shrink it, surely you should just chuck in as much of the latest-ripening material as possible?

Not quite.

The name of the game, remember, is diversity. The problem with a landscape dominated by clones is that vast swathes of the vineyard are susceptible to the same things at the same time. If sheep number 57 keels over when it gets thirsty (it’s black, increasing evapotranspiration), a drought will wipe out the whole row. Mitigate risk by having enough sheep 56 nearby. If sheep number 54 is particularly adept at passing on viruses, surround it by numbers 53 and 57, which aren’t. And so on.

The solution it to mix and match, to plant small quantities (Roederer are going with 50 vines of each at a time) of different selections in mini-blocks.

The potential

Such is the power of reassessing Champagne’s genetic material that it has turned into the most important area of Lécaillon’s work. “Of course going for Organic and cover crops is one thing. But if I had to retain one area of my work, this is the most powerful - it pushes me back to middle age where the monks in burgundy selected vines. This is the essence of it”, he says,

The story starts to come almost full circle, as programmes promise to make these massale selections commercially available…a bit like clones! The main difference is that the volume of massale selections being collated is far, far greater than the fifteen or so Pinot Noir clones recommended officially for Champagne.

Dolly, the first cloned sheep, died in 2003 as Champagne first encountered the sort of crazy-fast vintage it has dealt with on multiple occasions since. Even she might concede, today, that the world looks a bit different.

The clones aren’t going anywhere fast, but they’re getting plenty of new neighbours.

*A friend of mine founded an Indian restaurant with a great wine list called Masala Selection, but I don’t think a single customer ever got the gag**

**this didn’t actually happen, I’m just on a roll with dad jokes this summer and I’m not quite ready to stop yet