JamesSuckling Interviews: Mark Haisma

JamesSuckling Interviews features innovative and influential winery owners, winemakers and industry notables representing the new generation that is shaping tastes, trends and techniques in the greater wine world. 

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Australian-born winemaker Mark Haisma, the founder of Mark Haisma Wines in Burgundy, France, began his career at the Yarra Yering winery in Victoria, Australia, working for a decade with the renowned Dr. Bailey Carrodus before heading to Burgundy in 2007. With his passion for elegant, terroir-expressive wines, he began crafting limited production, micronegociant Gevrey-Chambertin wines that quickly gained an ardent fanbase and have since developed a dedicated cult following.

Haisma branched out into the northern Rhone in 2010, and began making viognier, shiraz and grenache as well as old-vine Cornas syrah from the Les Combes vineyard. His enthusiasm for new varieties and the next-generation of winemakers also led him to Romania in 2019, where he helped establish and launch Dagon Clan winery in Dealu Mare, training native winemaking teams in showcasing the country’s promising indigenous offerings. Today, Haisma farms four hectares of his own vineyards in the Macon and Gevrey-Chambertin as well as using purchased fruit at his winery, producing everything from AOC Bourgogne to Grand Cru.

Susan Kostrzewa recently caught up with Haisma to discuss the silver lining of climate change in Burgundy, wallet-friendly varieties to watch there, how his time in Australia has influenced his work in the Rhone and beyond, and why he thinks it’s key to bring back the fun in wine for future generations.

What are the biggest challenges for Burgundy in viticulture at the moment, particularly with climate change? How are you managing them?

We've got an interesting set of circumstances where it may be hot and dry, or it may be absolutely pouring down with rain. And the two scenarios give us a very different set of challenges. To deal with those effectively when we're not quite sure what's coming is quite a challenge. So, for example, if it's a wet year, like 2024, we'll be very keen to leave a lot of grass growing in the vineyards. That’ll help us get into the vineyard easily and it’ll help soak up a lot of the water.

Another example: we can go through a winter which has been wet and reasonably cold, but then we get a false spring and the vines decide, OK, bang – let's go. That means we can have a very dangerous period with a lot of tender shoots that have all come up, and then we get a deep frost and everything gets burned off. We're all pruning very late. If we prune late, we shock the vine into just staying dormant just that little bit longer. In these hot years, we want to think about canopy management and creating a microclimate. By increasing the height of the canopy, we can avoid the sun for a couple of hours through the day. But it’s not like you can click your fingers and all the work is done instantly. We need to plan. We need to get in there and do it.

Any silver linings?

Can I counter the challenge of these difficult vintages and say, maybe we're in a golden era of Burgundy? I'm much happier making wines today than I would have been, I suspect, 50 years ago, where the challenge was actually to get fruit ripe. Now, of course, we as winemakers need to adapt to this fast-ripening situation to still keep the freshness, the brightness, the elegance, the beauty of Burgundy – these characteristics that we all love. In the past, in Burgundy, you could count on a specific date to go pick. And how many times did we pick on the 15th of September? And that was that. Now we've got to be far more adaptive to these conditions. So for me, it's about an opportunity.

Has the change in the climate redefined the cru system in Burgundy? In other words, are some lesser-ranked appellations making better wines now as well as crus than in the past because of the hotter and sunnier weather?

Certainly some of these interesting, underrated vineyards can be a lot of fun. I love Volnay La Cave. It's the highest altitude. Pernand-Vergelesses Les Pins pinot noir, also at its highest altitude. These are cool sites. It's quite cold. We need to pick a little bit later. We’re all keen to make aligoté, and there's vast swathes that would have been planted 50 years ago that were used to make the rocket fuel for the bistro. Now these are old vines and they're making spectacular aligoté. We don't need to be always chasing Chassagne-Montrachet for a white wine here in Burgundy. They're a riper style, a bit more forward, a bit richer. And that old-vine characteristic really comes through.

Burgundy has had a number of extremely hot and dry vintages of recent including 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022. What can you do as a winemaker to compensate dark colors, high alcohol and low acidities?

Again, canopy management is a huge thing and not constantly plowing your ground. The reflective heat from a plowed ground is brutally hot. If we can leave a permanent grass, we create a couple of degrees of difference in our fruit zone. Those differences make a huge impact. Also, picking times – being completely aware of the evolution of the fruit, and not just relying on an arbitrary date that used to exist 20 years ago. Actually going out in the vineyard, tasting the vineyard, being aware of where the fruit is. All the great domains, they're totally on it. The price of Burgundy now dictates that we are making wines of great finesse, great elegance, great beauty. We can't be throwing out substandard Burgundy. That can't happen. The customer absolutely deserves great pinot noir. And I get very grumpy when I see bad pinot noir out in the market, especially with ridiculous faults like volatility, bacterial issues or 15 percent alcohol. That's a travesty and shouldn't be in our repertoire.

What about planting new varieties to accommodate these climatic changes?

When you pose a question in viticulture, it takes a generation for an answer to come. And the idea of planting different varieties [to plan for the future] is hugely interesting. So I declassified AOC land into Vin de France to really make an exercise in planting a different variety [such as gamay, aligoté]. We’ve got two vintages now and they're very exciting. Bordeaux, for example – one of the most traditional regions – has ripped up the rule book for a region and has introduced a whole bunch of different varieties for people in the regions where they've not been able to sell wine or fruit for years. Spanish varieties, Italian varieties, whites, reds. And it allows the new generation to really get involved in their terroir and come up with something else. We don’t need to go in quite that direction in Burgundy but it’s exciting to see it happening.

What are the last two or three great Burgundy vintages?

2015 right now is fantastic. It's on fire. It's just such a stunning vintage. 2017 has always been a fantastic vintage, especially in the whites. 2021: I love that spicy purity, that elegance, that brightness.

2024 was a very challenging year with all the rain. How did it turn out in the end?

I tell you what, come August, when we finally got all the work done, the whole team was exhausted. We were all on our knees. We had been working flat out for months and months and months. We had to grind it out. It was a year of attrition. There was no point backing off, and the people who did back off lost the whole lot. It's cost me an extraordinary amount of money to get 2024 into the winery and into wine. The volumes are catastrophically low. In places, there's 30 to 50 percent of what would be normal. The cut in the reds is really where we see a disaster. The fruit was good. The fruit was ripe, but to get to that point, by golly, we had to work really hard. We’ve got some lovely, pure, elegant pinots and chardonnays, but at the lower alcohol levels.

Why do yields remain low in Burgundy in general?

In 2024, we had a series of rain events that meant mildew was a disaster. And it basically burned the embryonic flowers and then the fruit set so we could see our harvest burning on the vine. Following big harvests in ‘ 22 and ’23, ’24 is going to be small. But I think the quality is there. So why did ‘23 drop us the motherlode? Fruit set, the flowering, all of these things were right. We had to green-harvest several times in ‘23 to get the cropping levels correct. ‘21 is a small vintage that's due to, in most parts, frost. You go through some of those previous vintages and there’s some frost and hail involved. There are other mitigating factors. But I would like to say that from 2016-2019, in volume total we lost about three-quarters of a vintage. It's not a disaster, is it? Let’s not be too sad about that for the Burgundian winemakers; the prices are high enough. They will survive. Their children will eat their dinner. We need to put that into perspective.

On that note, what are your thoughts about pricing in Burgundy?

So much of it comes down to the producer who's willing to maintain a steady pricing structure which doesn't gouge the market out. It would be really remiss this year for a huge price hike to occur on the ‘23. Regionally, it comes down to the growers and people willing to be honest about what they do. There are rock stars who are able to create a demand for their wines and pump up the prices. We see it in Burgundy all the time, this massive inflation. These new people who rock up onto the scene and just go, wham! Here it is. I'm going to make very little wine and I'm going to charge a stratospheric price for it, and I'm going to create an image. I really hope that settles down and doesn't become an attractive thing for new people to come into this market and say, OK, I'm going to do the same thing.

What are some appellations making value wine to look for in Burgundy?

Like I said, some of these aligoté vineyards are just delicious, and the quality from those is now much higher than what we used to do. The lowly Coteaux Bourguignons, a little bit of gamay in there, and I spice it up a little bit by putting a cartoon picture on the label just to again try and engage the bistro drinker – for the fun wine bar situation where we just have a fantastic drink with our friends. I think maybe I'm young at heart, but we need to engage that fun in wine and not just be stuck on past generations with their traditions in wine. Let’s bring it back to the kids.

How did your early career work in Australia influence what you do in Burgundy and the Rhone?

I've got to bring that back to my mentor Bailey Carrodus, who was the owner of Yarra Yering Vineyards. He took a bad boy under his wing and gave him an opportunity. For 10 years I worked with him as an understudy and I learned a respect for land, respect for the wine, respect for the customers and making beautiful wine. I think those ideals are stuck in me. And I'm always trying to find elegance and beauty in the work I do.

In Australia, we don't have an AOC. We plant what we like, where we like, and we do what we like. What’s on the label is what you've got to be able to prove. That's it. We planted sangiovese, we planted Italian varieties. We planted Portuguese varieties. So the breadth and width of the grape varieties we worked with was an amazing opportunity for me. We farmed the whole lot and we brought it all to one cellar. My reference was broad. We were constantly tasting wines, double blind tastings, from anywhere in the world. My palate became quite astute to what was globally going on. And then starting in the Rhone was a necessity for an Aussie boy, to be growing a bit of shiraz.

So you brought that know-how with you.

With these hot vintages in the Rhone, we can really blow out the alcohols. And I remember this in Australia, we got caught with our pants down where we made wines which were too alcoholic. And we had to be far more clever in the future vintages. It's etched into my mind. So I don't want to be making wines like that again. I come back to these terms again—elegance, beauty—and keeping this our focus in the way we approach winemaking and picking times. We’re really not picking on alcohol, we're picking on lift, aromatics. And that for me is the acids. That's pH. These are the things which define for me great wines, not necessarily alcohol.

How do you think we as an industry can better appeal to wine drinkers in the present and future as consumption declines?

These great chateaux and domaines across the breadth and width of the world – do you think they're going to allow their market to diminish and disappear? No. I think there'll be a lot of innovative thinking and engagement of the newer generation. It’s only a matter of time before they come back to quality beers and wines. And then the anti-alcohol lobby, that's a dangerous lobby.

There’s a lot of misguided information being pumped out into social media. Of course, moderation is the key. But to say that no alcohol is the only way is plainly ridiculous.

We need to come to the market with great wines that engage people and the pricing has got to be right to get that new generation involved in drinking. We engage them by young winemakers getting out there, getting creative, creating something delicious, not necessarily expensive, and bringing it to market to challenge these stupid soda pop/alco-pop garbage products.

– Susan Kostrzewa