To most people, the landscape of Swiss wine suggests precision-planted vines marching up murderous vertical slopes, with jagged mountains as backdrop and lakes or rivers at their feet. With this as the template, it’s hard to imagine a less typically Swiss wine landscape than deepest Canton Aargau, where Tom Litwan’s vines are planted.
In the game of Hunt the Vineyards, if you take the motorway from Basel heading for Zurich and dive off south after about an hour in the direction of Aarau, you’re already getting warmer. The beady-eyed wine lover will soon start to spot pockets of south-facing vines – the only chance of ripening grapes in this cool climate is to plant them on the sunniest slopes – widely scattered amongst bosky hilltops, flower-strewn hay meadows, cherry trees, cows – and carrots, which are to Aargau (popularly known as Ruebli-Land, carrot country) rather as brussels sprouts to Lincolnshire in eastern England.
If the vineyard location is surprising, Tom Litwan’s winemaking journey is hardly less so. He trained first as a stonemason, then worked in a rural B & B in Chablis, where he started honing his tastebuds and acquiring a taste for fine wine, especially Burgundy. “When I grow up I’m going to make wine”, he promised himself. Back home in Switzerland he did the rounds of several estates, working in Geneva and on Lake Biel, which he combined with studies at Changins, the Swiss viticulture and oenology school.
In 2006 he bought his first vineyard. Since then he has been quietly amassing a clutch of promising sites scattered around the canton, some of them wholly owned and others leased, all featuring the kind of highly desirable, crumbly mix of limestone and clay that characterises Burgundy’s best sites. He commutes from Zurich to his six hectares of vines in seven different villages including Oberhof, where the cellars are sited.
Pinot Noir accounts for 80 percent of the surface planted – he describes the grape as “my first love”. His second love, also acquired during his time in Chablis, is for Chardonnay. There is a place in his heart (and vineyards) too for Riesling-Sylvaner, the “speciality” of northern Switzerland, as well as confidential amounts of Cabernet Franc, the cool-climate red variety from the Loire.
He farms organically, without use of synthetic herbicides or pesticides, and biodynamically, following the phases of the moon. You only have to edge along the narrow terraces of his Oberhof vineyards in summer to see the level of biodiversity that results from the lack of chemical treatments. Richly infested with wild marjoram and St John’s Wort, the rows of vines also play host to quince trees, sloe bushes and the occasional fig – and clouds of happy bees and butterflies (“I think the vines are happy too”, he notes).
Considering he’s a bit of a newbie on the Swiss wine scene and has only worked on his own account since 2006, Litwan has been remarkably successful. The first break came when his wines were listed by Zurich-based merchant Brancaia (still the best source for Litwan’s wines, which are not available direct from the cellar). He has been invited to present his wines at the prestigious Mémoire & Friends event, has garnered Parker points galore and is listed as one of Gault Millau’s 100 best Swiss winemakers. How has he done it? The winemaker shrugs in slight bemusement and says, with disarming modesty, “I’ve been lucky”.
Luck has certainly played a part in his success, but so has skill, attention to detail and sheer hard work – plus an element of scarcity value. (In a good year he would hope to make barely 30,000 bottles; in 2017 it was about half that amount, due to damage from late frosts.)
A word of warning: these are not easy wines to get alongside. In their youth – and especially if you taste them, as I did, straight from the cask – they can smell a bit like rotten eggs or (more kindly) like a recently struck match. The geeky term for this bottle stink is reduction, and it’s due to a number of different winemaking choices made by Litwan all the way from vineyard to bottle. He is remarkably sanguine about this, and his serene conviction that the wine will settle down with age has been repeatedly borne out by experience.
Seasoned tasters rank his Chardonnay Wanne and Pinot Noir Chalofe among the best in Switzerland. If you can get hold of either of these, squirrel them away for at least five years, give them plenty of air before serving and the winemaker’s skill and the wines’ natural character will shine through.
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ADDRESS: Moosstrasse 280 5062 Oberhof CONTACT: Tel. 079 541 09 30 |
WINES TO LOOK OUT FOR: Chardonnay Wanne Pinot Noir Chalofe |
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Price range 20 to 94 SFr. |
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HIGHLIGHTS: Visits by appointment only. Wines are available for sale online at Vinothek Brancaia. |
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