How a marine biologist became a wine producer

Rahel Salathé, we are meeting here in your wine cellar in Chigny near Lake Geneva and tasting your Chardonnay. Do you remember the first time you drank wine?

RAHEL SALATHE: Yes, I know exactly when it was. When I was 17, my mother brought an expensive bottle of red wine home from a trip to France. She took out the cork and poured us both a glass. The first sip was a revelation: like fireworks in my nose and mouth, it felt like I was drinking liquid gold. I’ve been fascinated with wine since this first encounter with a Bordeaux.

At the time, did you ever think that one day you would press your own wine?

No, right from when I was at primary school, I knew I wanted to become a marine biologist. As a little girl, I spent a lot of time in the woods with my grandfather – he was a huntsman and was familiar not just with the tracks left by all the animals but many species of plant too. I was soon raising snails, relocating anthills and reading everything I could lay my hands on about researchers and explorers. The family situation in which I grew up was very unstable; I was often moved when I didn't want to and so felt very much alone. I felt much more at home in the world of plants and animals; I could rely on nature.

And yet, becoming a marine biologist isn't a common career goal for someone growing up in Switzerland.

This dream also has its roots in an experience I can clearly remember. The first time I went into the sea was in Greece with my mother. I was given a snorkel and diving mask – and I would have been very happy if I had never set foot on the land again; that’s how much I enjoyed drifting around and observing the underwater world. Later I watched the films made by the famous marine researcher Jacques-Yves Cousteau and wanted to know everything about how Jacques Piccard had managed to go down to a depth of almost 11 000 metres below sea level in a submarine he had made himself. It was clear to me that I needed to get good grades at high school so that I could study at ETH and go onto a research position in marine biology at a university abroad.

You saw studying at ETH as a way of achieving this goal?

I was advised that a degree from ETH would be a springboard to a future academic career. But what I thought would just be a way-point on my journey turned out to be the best days of my life. I spent at least 45 hours a week at ETH and wrote up my reports at home, but it didn't feel like hard work because I was so passionately interested in everything: ecology, evolutionary biology, the interaction between different forms of life; I even wanted to fully understand the machines we used for our practical experiments. I was so pleased to see that I was good at scientifically analysing problems and efficiently finding solutions to them. I was completely in my element and so full of euphoria that one evening I said to my colleague: “You’ll see, one day I’ll win a Nobel prize.”

So what got in the way?

(Laughs) Life in all its many facets. I wrote my dissertation in marine biology in Roscoff, where I managed to disprove a research paradigm when researching coastal food chains. I would have loved to have stayed in Brittany. A life shaped by the tides and the way in which the people are so linked to nature was good for me. But then I let myself be persuaded to come back to ETH where I had been given a “Carte Blanche” for a dissertation project. That’s when I met Marcel. He had started his dissertation in the same year as me. He wanted to go to Stanford for his post doc and I found an interesting post doc position in deep sea research at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. I researched worms living symbiotically on dead whale bones – and discovered two previously undescribed species in the process.

When did your career aspirations start to take a back seat?

When we then decided to start a family, it was clear that my career would no longer be my main priority for a while. I would not have had the heart to leave our children in the care of others from early morning to late evening. Instead, I wanted to give them the sense of security that was missing from my own childhood. I found one interesting part-time job after another – for example, I spent a couple of years managing the molecular lab of Andrew Read, the renowned researcher into malaria. But on the whole, during this time we were focused primarily on Marcel’s career and the well-being of our children. I struggled with the idea of sending our children into the American schooling system. When EPFL in Lausanne created a professorship for Marcel, we upped sticks and returned to the shores of Lake Geneva.

How did you come up with your own plan B?

Even during my time at ETH, every now and then I would jokingly say that if one day I was to go off biology, I would look for a vineyard and produce wine. I have always found it incredibly easy to recognise grape varieties in blind tastings – I used to love this game. When we got a place in Switzerland, my husband pointed out to me that the only viticulture and oenology school in Switzerland was just a quarter of an hour away from our home. So I started studying in Nyon in 2016. A few years later I had the opportunity to take on a management position in the Fairfish organisation.

Apparently, you can't escape marine biology that easily....

It was something very close to my heart. There is still so much we do not know about fish welfare. Just like mammals, fish are organisms capable of emotions – it is awful how we just tip them out of nets on boats or on land and leave them to suffocate.

How did you establish yourself as a wine producer?

Initially, I simply wanted to be able to produce three barrels of wine for self-consumption. But our friends were so positive about it that I wanted to launch my own label and also supply private customers and restaurants. I soon went off the idea of taking over a vineyard because it was the work in the wine cellar that I enjoyed so much. Most of the wine-growers around here do not produce wine themselves; they sell their grapes to major buyers. The fact that I do not own my own vines, but produce my own wine makes me rather unusual in this industry. But I am totally free and can do what I want – provided I can find the right grapes in my network. And that is how this Chardonnay came about in 2020. It is genetically related to Pinot Blanc, picked by hand on a vineyard belonging to a wine-grower I am friendly with in Tartegnin.

Your bottles cost between 24 and 49 Swiss francs – who are typical customers of Salathé wine?

I supply several restaurants and benefit a lot from word-of-mouth recommendations. Because I currently only produce a few hundred bottles of each variety every season, the prices of my bottles are higher than those of major producers. Producing a fine, elegant wine is extremely complex – the process always reminds me of the experiments we used to do in the lab. It is important to me that you can sense the character, the taste profile of the grapes, when drinking it. Recently in California I was again disillusioned to discover that their wines produced from various grape varieties taste very similar because the pressed grapes are enriched with wood chips, lending the wine a hint of vanilla. I take a different approach to my work. It is an intensive search for clues and often a balancing act between craftsmanship and art.

Will you be able to make a living from your wines in the foreseeable future?

I believe there is still a lot of potential in this niche market and can well imagine my wines being exported to the USA or China. I have frequently received compliments from experts at wine trade fairs and in contests. I am currently working hard to expand by client base. But if it does not work out financially, I can see myself sharing my passion for nature and becoming a biology teacher or mentor for young female researchers. At many points in my life I have encountered mentors with confidence in me at just the right moment so I know how valuable this can be. It would be good to be able to give something back.