The long way home

There are probably more sensible cars for delivering wine.

Our Mercedes-AMG E63 Estate is not one of them.

It is big, thirsty, rather unnecessary and capable of travelling considerably faster than any bottle of rosé has a legitimate reason to. But after several journeys across France, down autoroutes, over mountain passes and along dusty vineyard tracks, we have come to the conclusion that it might also be the perfect Sirene company car.

We chose an estate for the obvious reason. Wine takes up quite a lot of space.

When we travel through France, we rarely know exactly what we are going to come home with. A tasting might result in a polite handshake and an empty boot. Or we might discover something wonderful and suddenly need to find room for twenty-five cases.

That makes carrying capacity rather important.

But there is another side to these journeys.

Getting there.

Made for the long road

Finding our wines often involves crossing France in a day, sometimes travelling hundreds of miles before turning off the autoroute and spending the final hour winding through hills, villages and increasingly questionable tracks.

For that, the E63 is remarkably good.

Underneath all the AMG theatre is an E-Class, a car designed to cover enormous distances without making those distances feel enormous. The AMG engineers retained that long-distance comfort while developing the chassis, using adaptive damping to respond continuously to road conditions and load. The rear suspension even maintains the car’s ride height automatically, irrespective of what is being carried.

That last detail becomes particularly relevant when the boot begins filling with wine.

We discovered this properly in Cabrières.

After spending the day with Luc in the vineyards beneath the Pic de Vissou, we returned to the tasting room and worked our way through the wines before settling on the Grenache, Syrah and Carignan blend that would become our Triton red.

Then we loaded 25 cases into the Mercedes.

There is a moment when that much wine disappears into the back of a performance estate when you begin to question some of your life choices.

The Mercedes simply levelled itself and headed for Toulouse.

A chance meeting in Beaune

There is another reason the Mercedes has become part of the Sirene story.

On a different journey through France, we stopped overnight at Hotel Le Clos in Beaune. We were on our way to sample Burgundy and, as often happens on these trips, the interesting part of the journey began before we reached the vineyard.

That evening we met an elderly gentleman who introduced himself as Stefan. He was in his late seventies, spoke with a thick German accent and noticed the Mercedes parked outside.

We started talking.

It turned out Stefan was from Affalterbach, the small German town that became the home of AMG. More remarkably, he told us that his first and only job had been working as an engineer at AMG, joining as an apprentice shortly after the company was founded in 1967.

Suddenly an overnight stop on our way to discover the provenance of Burgundy had given us an unexpected connection to the provenance of the car that had brought us there.

AMG began with two engineers, Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher. Aufrecht had worked at Mercedes-Benz, while Melcher was a master engine designer. The two began by working on racing engines before establishing AMG in 1967. The name came from Aufrecht, Melcher and Großaspach, Aufrecht’s birthplace.

What began with two engineers and a fascination with making engines perform better eventually became the company that built the car sitting outside our hotel.

And here we were, more than half a century later, talking to someone who had spent his entire working life there.

It was one of those encounters you couldn’t have planned.

Which is increasingly why we like travelling this way.

One person, one responsibility

Talking to Stefan also made us think differently about the car.

At the heart of AMG is a beautifully simple idea: One Man, One Engine.

A single master engine builder takes personal responsibility for assembling an AMG engine from beginning to end. When the work is finished, their name is placed on the engine.

The more we thought about it, the more familiar that philosophy felt.

It is remarkably close to what attracts us to the smaller vineyards we choose to work with.

There is usually one vigneron overseeing the whole journey. Someone who understands the soil, tends the vines, watches the weather, decides when the grapes are ready, oversees the harvest and follows the wine through its making. There are other hands involved, of course, but someone remains connected to the whole.

One person. One engine. One wine.

It isn’t really about one person doing everything.

It’s about responsibility.

About remaining close enough to what you are making to understand how every decision affects the finished thing, and caring enough about the result to be prepared to put your name on it.

That matters to us.

An unreasonable amount of attention

AMG’s approach to the rest of the E63 seems to have followed much the same philosophy.

Before the car reached production, its engineers subjected it to around 780,000 test miles over 19 months. Development included high-speed running in South Africa, heat testing in Arizona, Arctic cold and chassis development on the Nürburgring. Engines, transmissions, cooling systems and suspension components were pushed through conditions far beyond those most owners would ever encounter.

Later prototypes travelled from Death Valley to Pikes Peak, Swedish Lapland to Arizona. The engineers deliberately pushed the cars beyond the loads they expected customers to impose upon them, simply to understand where the limits were.

There is something wonderfully excessive about that.

And strangely, it reminds us of the people whose wines we buy.

Our winemakers work at a rather different speed, but the instinct is familiar. They watch the weather. Work the soil. Walk the vines. Taste the grapes. Harvest at precisely the right moment. Then make hundreds of small decisions that most people drinking the finished wine will never know were made.

Much of good craftsmanship is invisible.

You simply experience the result.

The fast way to take the slow road

There is a contradiction about the Mercedes that we rather like.

It is an extremely fast car that we use to take detours.

We have driven it across France to visit vineyards that produce relatively tiny quantities of wine. We have taken it down dusty tracks that probably weren’t considered during development at Affalterbach. We have turned it around because we spotted a classic car show through a hedge. We have filled it with wine in Provence and Languedoc and stopped for lunches in places we would never have discovered if we had simply followed the quickest route home.

Perhaps that is why it has quietly become part of the Sirene story.

It isn’t simply transport.

The Mercedes carries us to the people we want to meet and the places we want to understand. Then, when we find something worth sharing, it carries the bottles home.

There are certainly easier ways to buy wine.

But the easiest route rarely produces the best story.

We set out for Beaune looking for Burgundy and found ourselves talking to a man from Affalterbach who had spent his working life building things with much the same attention we look for in our wines.

Perhaps that’s why we keep taking the long way.

You never quite know what you’ll bring home.