On Lees
A brief look at the role of lees in winemaking.
In 1997, there was the first Vin Jaune festival, La Percée du Vin Jaune. This year, its organizers are taking a break to refocus its efforts and better organize for the nearly 40,000 enthusiasts patronizing the festival for the past 20 years. What’s this fantastic thing that wine lovers are celebrating in numbers consistent with Burgundy’s biggest wine festivals? In a word, lees. The festival celebrates a special wine called Vin Jaune (yellow wine) that’s made with 6 years of ageing under a blanket of dead yeast cells called, lees. Lees give a rounder body and unique flavor to these wines, but this is only an extreme version of a process and subsequent flavor profile proper to lots of wines. Here we have a look at the lees themselves, what they contribute to a wine, and which producers utilize them to make something one-of-a-kind.
What are Lees?
The word ‘lee’ comes from the Old English plural of ‘obsolete’. Wine lees presumably got their meaning as just such extra stuff, dregs. Still, since the very beginning of winemaking, vignerons have used this extra sediment to enhance the flavor and texture of their wines, as well as to protect the wine during aging.
Today we think of lees coming in two distinct varieties: fine lees and gross lees. The distinction is made based on the size of the sediment in the grape must. Bigger chunks are the gross lees. They are made up of grape skins, grape seeds, and stems. Fine lees are smaller and primarily consist of dead yeast cells. In general, when we talk about ageing sur lie (on the lees), when we talk about wine made sous voile (under floor), ouillé, wines that taste leesy… we’re talking about the fine lees.
What’s the difference between gross lees and tannin?
Since gross lees are bigger pieces of sediment that we associate with the same things we associate with tannins (seeds, skins, etc.), you might take the difference to be a purely semantic one. That idea is fair enough, but ‘tannins’ exist in grapes prior to crushing, fermentation, and storage. ‘Tannin’ actually refers to a lot of different plant tissues like bark, galls and whatever else. ‘Gross lees’ refer to sediment. So if the gross lees aren’t just the grape tannins, then they’re made up of grape tannins.
Lees and Texture
Back when the Romans were making wine, they recognized a creamy texture and fuller bodied wine that resulted from aging their wines sur lie. Today we know that this textural character is born out of the biological process of autolysis. It is a chemical process by which yeasts cells die off. As enzymes start to break down, the dead yeast cells release complex sugars, polysaccharides, and amino acids. All of which contribute to this heavier texture and mouthfeel.
Wines that are aged on the lees often have an extra smoothness and weight that helps to smooth out the corners of sharp, angular wines. After a year or so of lees aging, there is a subtle softness, but after a few years, flavors become more layered and there is a richness and rounded character to the wine that is characteristic of this process.
Lees and Flavor
The best winemakers try to produce clean fruit that is emblematic of the place it is grown. The worry with techniques like lees aging, oak aging, chapitalization, etc., is that you might mask the flavors proper to a given terroir. In the good cases, techniques like lees aging help to curtail anomalies and enhance deficiencies, finding harmony as well as character.
Sur lie aging makes for wines with flavors like fresh bread, creamy meringue, buttered toast, soft cheese, and sometimes floral, baby powder notes. Lots of wines that benefit from lees are cooler climate wines with more austere fruit. These unctuous flavors supplement this austerity. Perhaps even more importantly, the soft flavors brought to the wines can counteract the astringency one typically associates with cooler climate wines.
So while this additive technique may sometimes impart something outside of the flavors grounded in the fruit, it can equally clean the lens through which we experience terroir. This is particularly the case with a certain set of grapes that are strongly correlated with this process as well as in certain places where lees are essential to the wines.
Lees and Chardonnay
Chardonnay is a neutral variety and so it’s grown all over the world with really variable character. Chardonnay has one flavor profile in California and another in the Jura, for instance. Still, it’s a solid variety that has garnered international renown for its stability and it’s knack for bringing some finesse to a wine.
Like any variety, it can be understated or bombastic, but the latter type generally comes as a result of work done in the cellar. For many people, oak aging and Chardonnay go hand-in-hand. That toasted vanilla flavor imparted by oak is common in Burgundy, but even more so in California. Chardonnay, in its neutrality, makes for a great canvas for these flavors.
The same goes for the flavors of fine lees. Chardonnay sees aging on the lees in Champagne, the Jura, Italy, the U.S., Slovenia and elsewhere. Chardonnay’s hardiness makes it the perfect variety for imparting these complex flavors onto a given wine. Chardonnay from the Jura can be creamy, nutty, yeasty, and super rich as a result of sur lie aging, despite its alpine climate. Chardonnay from Italy garners some structure and complexity despite its warmer climate and riper fruit.
Lees and Savagnin
Savagnin is the opposite story. Some close relatives of this variety are grown in Germany and Switzerland, but otherwise it is almost exclusively associated with the Jura in France. This is a grape that’s strictly tied to fine lees aging, but in many different guises. For this reason, it’s not easy to tell exactly what the variety brings to the flavor profile of these wines. It suffices to say that it is a rather aromatic white grape with floral and citrus notes.
First and most famously, there is the aforementioned Vin Jaune (yellow wine) made in the Château-Chalon and L’Étoile villages of the Jura. Savagnin is the only variety legally permitted for this style of wine (more on its production below).
Savagnin is also blended with Chardonnay to make a still wine that begins its life under a floor of lees (sous voile), which is continuously topped off with new wine as the batch evaporates, resulting in a fresher style Savagnin.
Cremant du Jura is a sparkling wine made from Savagnin. It is a crisp, apple-flavored, and yeasty, typically seeing about a year aging on the lees.
There are some sweeter and/or fortified wines made in the Jura that contain Savagnin. These include Vin de Paille (straw wine) and Macvin. Often these wines see lees aging, but the flavor profile proper to this process is mitigated by other factors like fortification, blending, and other idiosyncratic techniques.
Lees and Muscadet
Terroir driven wines are wines of a place. In Muscadet, sur lie aging is as attached to the place as the bedrock. Having the phrase ‘sur lie’ on your bottle of Muscadet is a sign of quality, so much so that since the 90’s there are legal restrictions for adding this label to a bottle. The wines must spend the entire winter on the lees to comply with this stricture.
Muscadet makes clean, crisp, and dry wines with a excellent ability to express its soil type. The grape is a rather neutral variety: Melon de Bourgogne. It is highly acidic and light in body — lemony and tart in austerity, pineapple and passionfruit when ripe.
Lots of winemakers in Muscadet focus on making wines that express their granite, gneiss or orthogneiss soils. These are some of the wines people talk about when they talk about minerality. There is a stoniness and mineral character that can be undeniable; Tasting Muscadet can be like sucking on a river stone.
Lees aging helps to round out these hard edges and give these angular wines some shape, filling out an absence of softer flavors.
Lees and Champagne
One of the things that makes Champagne special is its limestone terroir. The issue of soil influence on wine is a weird and contentious one, but the correlation between regions making some of the best wine in the world and their limestone bedrock is hard to deny. This would be Burgundy, Alsace, parts of California, the Rhone, and Champagne.
Chalky soils in Champagne offer rich nutrients, water retention in a draught, proper drainage when it’s rainy, a perfect structure for roots, and an ideal pH balance. People also talk about the flavors of wine from limestone: a kind of sweetness to the fruit cut with some tart, citrus acidity.
Lees aging is important here for many of the same key reasons listed above. Champagne has a cooler climate, so the wines can be less than perfectly ripe. Couple this with the stark acidity from the bedrock, the neutrality of Chardonnay, and you have a perfect candidate for lees aging — so much so that it is a legal requirement for all Champenoise wines. Lees give a particular richness to Champagne that is like nothing else in the wine. Champagne’s soft, biscuit, yeast flavor comes as a result of each bottle remaining in contact with lees until disgorgement.
Cava Recaredo
One limestone-rich domaine located way outside Champagne is Bittlles Valley Highland in Spain, where Cava Recaredo produces a totally dry, beguiling, and biodynamic cava with a full five years of sur lie aging. This is Catalonia, in the Penedès region just south of the city of Barcelona. The family-run estate has 46 hectares of vines, all harvested according to strict biodynamic principles, making for the most natural product possible (nearly unique for traditional cava production today).
The lauded “Terrers” cuvée is a blend of mostly Macbeau and Xarel.lo, with just a small percentage of Parellada. The base wine (around 10 percent of the finished product) comes from still wine aged in oak. This wine is blended with stainless steel, tank-fermented wine and bottled for second fermentation(or elevage). Here the wine sits on its lees for 5 years, gaining a depth and complexity rivaling many age-worthy Champagnes.
Its best examples present a high wire act between a wine that’s richly honeyed and nutty, and a wine that is emblematic of the sheer freshness and crunchy acidity of its limestone bedrock.
Gahier vin Jaune
The only other wine as closely connected to lees aging as Champagne is the greatly alluded to Vin Jaune. In the village of Montigny-les-Arsures, in the Arbois region of the Jura, Michael Gahier produces an incredible example of this special wine. He has 6.5 hectares split up into parcels that result in unique cuvees, the most illustrious of which is his Vin Jaune, or yellow wine.
This wine comes from Gahier’s most choice plantings of Savagnin. The grapes are pressed and remain in an open-top, oak barrels for nearly 7 years. The wines avoid total oxidation as a result of the lees that sit on top of the wine like a lid. This process is called aging ‘sous voile’, meaning under veil. The richness of flavor and texture; the complexity of the fruit; and the sheer information available to the palate in this special wine is all imparted during this sous voile aging.
Gahier suggests that the best wines take between 10 and 20 years of bottle aging for all of this information to find its proper harmony. The bottles I’ve been lucky enough to have are like nothing else. After 20 years, these wines maintain a great acidity to cut through the yeastiness of the lees. More than all of that, the wine can be so many different things at once, presenting a litany of flavors with pristine transparency: raisin, hazelnut, lemon, curry, fresh bread, mousse, apples, Scotch whisky, cimammon, clove… are somehow all available in full form. The wine is a testament to this ancient winemaking process, and the functional role of lees aging in general.
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