Dubuis & Rudaz in the press
Why natural wine?
INTERVIEW “THE COLOR OF WINE” WITH PHILIPPE DUBUIS
Philippe, can we say that you produce natural wines?
Yes, I raise natural wines, that is to say grapes produced with the greatest respect for nature, we no longer use synthetic products, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. We use biodynamic methods on our vines for many years. Since the 2022 vintage, all of our vines have been Bio Suisse certified. All our wines are raised to organic standards and now carry the Bourgeon Vert label from Bio Suisse, I think I can say without anything else that my wines are natural.
Isn't this environment, this “terroir” that we often talk about, being lost due to an increasingly corrective oenology-chemistry that allows for a multitude of manipulations?
Of course, we lose the notion of terroir because we are no longer in symbiosis with it. The ancients bequeathed us a soil which has a memory, it is this memory which makes a wine “terroire”! But it is clear that today, explaining and making people appreciate the multitude of different tastes is not commercial enough... This is the fundamental cultural difference between the wines of the New World and Europe: they think in terms of drink , we in wine.
However, they are strong in terms of marketing, their wines appear in competitions…
Yes, that's it, they make oenologically perfect wines, no place for terroir, we standardize without fault! Competitions mean nothing if they are run by oenology fundamentalists. This is insane! Wine is the soul of the land, we try to interpret this land a bit like a cook interprets a dish: he has natural ingredients, he arranges them in a way to enhance the flavors. I consider myself a “wine cook”, I strive to enhance the flavors of the earth. But it is clear that we have entered the era of wine drinking.
More than oil, water will become a vital issue for our planet, but these so-called New World wines massively water the vines, far from ecological awareness, what about in Valais ?
Valais experienced years of overproduction which no longer make any sense today. Watering massively means treating the vines massively and then massively manipulating and correcting the wines in the cellar, that’s a headlong rush! A good winegrower is first and foremost a good observer of his vines. On certain soils, for example shale with little water retention, if the vine suffers in a year of extraordinary drought, we can, by light watering, prevent it from water stress. But this is done upstream, and ultimately, a good winegrower waters very little, at most once a season. We are far from the misters of Nappa Valley…
How do you see the future?
For our domain, it is radiant! (laughs). It is ultimately up to consumers to choose and I would say to them: “Drink little but drink well”, and the key word to navigate this is trust. Trust organized as a chain between the producer who strives to respect his terroir and the serious distributor who searches and tastes to offer only natural wines.
The final sentence?
By tasting our wines you discover the minerality of the soils, the aromatic intensity and the natural colors specific to each grape variety, in short, wines of pleasure!