Pouillé sur Cher (Touraine, Loire)
Biodynamic farming is a growing phenomenon among the organic farmers and growers, we begin ourselves non-farmers to hear about 501 and 500 which we vaguely know are sprayings made on
the vineyard at special times along the year, but we don't have often the opportunity to really see how
it's done and have a direct experience of these practices. In France a few years back nobody knew who Rudolf steiner was (except in Alsace), and as a firm
believer in my youth I had to explain his visionary to friends who were unsettled if not suspicious by his approach to human history and his cosmogony. Today, thanks to Steiner's small agricultural part in his teaching, thanks to a few daring French growers he has become very well respected in this country if not yet mainstream.
Biodynamics is more than just organic farming, it's a holistic approach on the soil, the plant life and it connects to the whole universe. Rudolf Steiner's work, and not only the one related to agriculture, is precisely on this level, tapping into forces unknown to the modern man but that encompass the energy of the cosmos.
With biodynamie you do things that don't seem to make sense in the square Cartesian thinking and reasoning we've been brought up with. And the odd thing is that many growers who once decided to try biodynamics say they didn't really believe it themselves either at the beginning, but they saw obvious results not only in the plant life but also in the wine, and they invested themselves more deeply into it, even though they still could have trouble to grasp the cosmology and spirituality of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner's understanding of the world is of the level of inspiration, like what Goethe did in his Theory of Colours, both visionaries possibly decried in their time by official science but plebiscited by reality.
I had the chance to witness the making of a 501 preparation and its subsequent spraying on the parcels, as such a preparation must be spread over the foliage and the vineyard in the following hours. This all took place in Pouillé-sur-Cher, the vineyards being the ones formerly owned by Clos Roche Blanche and now farmed by both Julien Pineau and Laurent Saillard
Vauxrenard, Beaujolais
Michel Guignier is making wine in a remote valley near Vauxrenard, in a farm bordering protected woods and wild life. You drive through a mountain pass near here, it's like you're still in the Beaujolais but almost edging on the first mountains of the Massif Central. The
surrounding of the wine farm is so beautiful
and peaceful, you'd almost feel like in an Alpine hideout complete with its woods, cows and prairies, and by the way Michel is a real farmer, raising meat cows and other animals along with tending his parcels and making wine.
When I reached the isolated farm at the end of a dead-end road at a good distance from Vauxrenard on my motorbike, I walked around, saw first his mother then his wife, and they helped me find him, he was either, they said, in the parcel right next to here or in the chai, you really felt like in a real old-time farm with the view over the Beaujolais and the bunch of ruminating white cows enjoying the sun.
Michel Guignier has a long lineage of winegrowers-farmers behind him in his family tree, when he was a child he'd walk to the elementary school in Vauxrenard, no less than 3 kilometers one way using a shortcut through prairies and parcels. He is a man with a passion for authenticity and non-interventionist winemaking. His vineyard is organic since 2000 (at the time there was only a handful of organic growers in the Beaujolais) and it is now farmed along biodynamics. I felt in him a deep commitment to Rudolf Steiner's understanding of the need for a farm to be a living organism by its own.
Morgon, Villié-Morgon (Beaujolais)
The Domaine de la Bonne Tonne now headed by Marcel & Monique Grillet is a family wine farm that has been growing grapes for 6 generations. Marcel's elders worked on a small surface like 3 or 4 hectares, doing some vegetables and a few cows on the side too.
Marcel Grillet who will be succeeded by his son Aurélien works on about 4 hectares, his philosophy has never been to grow his surface
but keep quality terroirs and work them well.
This domaine
is interesting not only because it is now organic since 2006 (it started its conversion in 2003) but because well before that time it had already taken a qualitative approach on its own. What made him decide to farm organic back then was that he wanted to return to the real values of farming, initially it was not even to be organic certified but he just wanted to plow his vineyard and stop dumping all this herbicide. Even at the start of the domaine from 1975 to 1978 he was not using herbicide, the first year he used some was 1978, but he never felt at ease with this spraying, and later, even before he started his conversion to organic, he began to plow his vineyard instead of spraying the weeds. Then later he thought he might farm organic altogether and began the conversion. He has to make 5 runs with the tractor to control the grass, which is not that difficult actually, and his vineyard is in much better shape. Given that he has some surface on Côte du Py, Aaron asks how many other vignerons are farming organic on this terroir, he says just Foillard and Lapierre. Again it is surprising how few growers on the best terroirs in the Beaujolais have common sense and do a respectful work.
Pictured on left : Mélisse, the cute and discreet domaine's dog. Mélisse is also a plant, and Marcel Grillet says with a laugh that he always names his pets along a plant.
Villié-Morgon, Morgon (Beaujolais)
Anthony Thevenet is a young winegrower with deep wine family roots in Villié-Morgon, a small town which is associated with great winemakers like Foillard, Lapierre, Descombes, Breton and Chanudet. Anthony, who makes wine in the very farm where his own grand-grandfather had his chai, started his own domaine in 2013. The house and facility really feels like a farm, isolated in the middle of its vineyards. To reach it, it's pretty simple, you first head to Jean Foillard, passing in front of his gate on your right, you keep driving (or riding in our case), then a few hundred meters you'll pass the wine farm of Marcel Lapierre also on your right, then the small tree-lined
river of Douby and you'll take the second small road on your left, it's a dirt/gravel road
if I remember and on our two-wheelers with Aaron it was a bit tricky, especially that we weren't sure of the way. It's slightly on the outskirts of Villié-Morgon and you have a nice view of the village in the far from his parcels of Douby (pic on right, the river flows among the trees in the bottom).
Anthony started with working with harvest combines in a service company in the Mäconnais but he didn't like the job very much, then he enrolled the viticulture school and worked at Georges Descombes for 7 years (from 2005 or 2006), part of this time being shared between work at the domaine and his studies. In the end of 2012 when he switched to working for Jean Foillard and he started his own domaine in parallel at the same time. That's with Descombes (nicknamed "Le Noun" by his peers) that he learnt everything on natural winemaking, he had worked before at Guillot also in Villié-Morgon but this was a big conventional domaine with dozens of hectares in both the Beaujolais and in the southern Rhone, it was like working in a big company. While in the viticulture school one of his school mates in his class was Damien Coquelet and as he was wondering where to find a domaine willing to accept him for the compulsory training during his studies, Damien told him to go ask his stepfather Georges Descombes, and that's how he landed there. If he also went to work later at Foillard, that's because before starting his domaine he wanted to experience the work of another natural grower and winemaker.
Romanèche-Thorins, Moulin-à-Vent (Beaujolais)
There has been new developments recently for Julie Balagny, the young Paris native who happened to become in a very short time one of the sought-after winemakers of
Beaujolais. When B. and I visited for my last profile
this was in 2011 and she was living in a charming isolated house with a wonderful view, her chai was
yet in another place, there was much commuting, and she found now a large farm with a soul in the village of Romanèche-Thorins (in the Thorins part) where she can make her wine, store her tools and she even can keep farm animals, although she'll keep the larger animals near her parcels of En Remond.
Speaking of her vineyard surface, she recently took over an additional hectare in generic Beaujolais plus 70 ares (0,7 hectare) of Moulin-à-Vent and her total vineyard surface is now 4,7 hectare...
For the information it is interesting to remind that before 1936 the Moulin-à-Vent wines were called Romanèche-Thorins wines and the name change took place when the appellation system delimited the area in september 1936. The new name refers precisely to the old windmill (moulin à vent) stiing at the edge of Romanèche-Thorins (on the Thorins side). The windmill is now a historical landmark, it has been built in the 15th century to grind the local farmers' grains, which means of course that at the time farms were into polyculture, and winegrowing was just part of the subsistence economy here. Beside the appellation name setting, Moulin-à-Vent wine was used for a very long time, as documented on an invoice dating from 1757.
Incidently, we're at the border of Beaujolais and Burgundy here, and Romanèche-Thorins is located in the Saône-et-Loire département, thus in Burgundy, which makes more administrative difficulties, like she has to see with the Douanes of Mäcon, Burgundy (the Douanes or French Customs is the short name for the DGDDI, the administation in charge of checking the wineries) for her administration papers and requirements.
Morgon, Villié-Morgon (Beaujolais)
Karim Vionnet who is born in this hamlet of Morgon started in 2005 as a seasonal worker for winegrowers of the area, then he spent time working at Guy Breton during the vinfications (in addition to doing the seasonal vineyard work), Guy Breton being himself one of the handful of vignerons who along with Marcel Lapierre sort of launched the return to a simple, non-interventionist winemaking in the Beaujolais a couple decades ago. While working for Guy Breton in 2005 he was in charge to teach a young Japanese guy the art of
pruning and tending the vineyard and it happened that in 2006 this trainee brought one day another Japanese guy with him, this was Yoshinobu of Vins Coeur who asked him
straight away if he had any wine to sell. He couldn't say yes immediately because even though he did help at the winemaking at Guy Breton, he hadn't any vineyard of his own to begin with, but by april 2006 he found his first 2 hectares on the village of Quincié and he could begin to make wine with the reasonable certitude to sell his wine, with Japan as his very first client [pretty happy beginning, I think]. That's when Karim set up his own domaine, in 2006. His surface grew to 10 hectares until 2008 (he was doing Beaujolais-Villages, Chiroubles, Moulin-à-Vent, Chénas) but in 2013 he downsized to 5 hectare because this was too much work (he farms organic and plows the soils). His vinification is additives free beginning with no lab yeast and no chaptalization, and none of the many corrective products of course. He just now adds 1 gram per hectoliter of SO2 which is very minimal.
In my opinion, you find in his wines the enjoyable chew typical of these unfiltered, virtually so2-free carbonic-maceration wines, plus they're very affordable.
Morgon is kind of a separate hamlet in the middle of the vineyards, this hamlet depending of the village of Villié-Morgon, which almost looks like a small town and where you find the wine bar (L'Atelier du Cuisinier) with the best wine list around. That's another oddity that the terroir which is so wellknown [Morgon] is named along a hamlet, or, if we put it the other way around, that the economic activity (businesses, shops...) has not more developped in this part of the village {of Villié-Morgon]. Karim moved here (in Bas Morgon, which means lower Morgon) in 2010, not that he was far away before, he was in Le Clachet, a hamlet on the other side of Villié-Morgon.
Julienas, Beaujolais
Given the fame of the Juliénas appellation I would have thought that organic viticulture had a few followers in this northern Beaujolais village, but here is the only family winery based in Julienas that is farming organic : The Domaine David-Beaupère is a fairly new domaine as it was formally set up by Louis-Clément David-Beaupère in 2008. The
founder wasn't initially in the wine trade, working in finance and other fields first, his own father
was a doctor but the family owned land and vineyards which were exploited by a farmer (fermage), the wine being mostly sold to the négoce. When he started the domaine and until 2014 the family vineyard surface was only 4 hectares and Louis-Clément added since then a couple of rented parcels (including one in Moulin-à-Vent) to diversify his wines. From what I understand Louis-Clément's father also made a bit of wine for himself and sold some, but this activity was never fully developped as a full-fledged business.
The wine farm sits alone at a distance from Juliénas (pictured on right as seen from the front of the house), no neighbors and there's a beautiful view in front of the old farm. His father bought the place in the 1960s' and from what I understand one of the reasons Mouis-Clément embarked in this winery adventure was not only a dissatisfaction with his former activity but the will to develop this family domaine which I can understand also when I see the beauty of the place. His initial training was not really adapted as he was into finance and commerce, and he had to study viticulture, which he did from 2005 to 2007 in Lyon at Isara.
Fleurie (Beaujolais)
This pressing season was certainly comparatively early in 2015 because of a long sunny weather and by the end of september the carbonic macerations were going to the press, at least in the Beaujolais domaines where carbo is still practiced (it's less common that you may think). 2015 is a vintage with beautiful, healthy gamay grapes, certainly a great vintage even though acidity is lower this year.
I spent a few days in the Beaujolais with Aaron, who has been immersing himself for a few weeks in the local winery scene in order to learn more about the region. The Beaujolais is a wine region that deserves more interest, like elsewhere you
have the organic/conventional, uninterventionist/technological dichotomy, but it's foremost here that a
simple, traditional vinification was put back in the front seat by a handful of resolved individuals a couple decades ago. By the way there are two ways to witness this dichotomy, first when you drive through the vineyards and second when you taste the wines randomly. I won't be cruel to the point to ask you use the second option, just drive along the winding roads, you'll be surprised how a large majority of the vineyards are still soaked with herbicides in the Beaujolais. With the cellar pendant of this herbicide thing being that much of the wines go through thermo-vinification and don't taste anymore like a real wine, this leaves relatively few wineries to sample when you're looking for interesting wines.
This story is a visual one, no explanation needed, making real wine is pretty simple when you grow your grapes correctly and respect the soil. No technology here, just fairly traditioinal tools and fermenters in a bland building (pictured on left) without even the charm of a historical place, you could buy that sort of vertical press with little money, same for the fermenters. The mainstream consumer thinks all wines are made this way but that's alas not true. Here the quality of the grapes, the natural balance of the soils and of the vineyard management makes corrective technology and additives completely irrelevant. But it is probable that if modern, conventional wineries did vinify this way (no lab yeast, no additives, no correction) all the while keeping growing their grapes the way they do, their wines would be plain undrinkable [not that they're really drinkable without that....].
What seemed important here was hygiene, Yvon, his son Jules and staff Alexi (with cap) were hosing repeatedly everything including the ground. And the carefully-grown and picked grapes did the real work.
Picture on right : view from the chai with La Madone chapel on the top of the hill.
Riedel threatening writer Ron Washam for satirical article
When I read this story on Jim's blog, then the incriminating satirical piece, I thought I might try to say a few things about the issue. I never jumped into the potentially-hot issue of fancy glassware but you may have noticed that my pictures often show traditional non-tech glasses when I'm speaking about a particular wine I discovered here and there. I love these glasses, they're possibly not the most effective tools to detect the ultimate aroma coming out from a wine, but they're time-proven vessels [I
found many of them on flea markets] coming straight from an era (early 20th century) when wine was shared
around a table without this ostentatious need to analyze it from A to Z. People loved and enjoyed wine for centuries without fancy modern glass designs and I'm confident they still can today. But for a couple of decades we have entered an era of wine geeks and intellectualization of wine tasting, and these smart glassware companies made us believe that we can't be real wine amateurs if we don't invest in there costly glassware.
This blog article innocently mocking the prestige and the supposed calculations of Riedel was indeed feriously funny, and the thing is, it may have struck a chord among the business people behind these fancy glasses as they threatened to sue the writer who wrote this humoristic article. Now that's some thing, a big, powerful company like Riedel feeling so bad after a satiric story that they want to silence the writer... Doesn't this mean that they don't feel secure about the relevance of their supposedly-irreplaceable glass designs ? Then we learn that the Riedel people backtracked and said it was all fine, just that it had to be underlined that this was a satirical piece, not a real story. Actually they probably realized that this over-reaction was a very, very bad PR operation, but they switched attitude only after other influential bloggers and journalists like Jim put the spotlight on the issue. Come on... This was obviously a calculated move for damage control, not a sudden acknowledgement of the sense of humor. The good side of this appaling story is that it may spark some soul searching about the conformism that fuels the fancy glassware business. People enjoyed wine in many ways for centuries before the modern tech wonders, wine is to be shared and to be gently intoxicated (this is never adressed in the politically-correct circles of the wine media), and we all know that the best wines can do that.
Let's look at the issue from another perspective : what Dionysos would do in this context ? Like in this famous scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I doubt he'd choose among the fancy glasses and instead of the false Grails he'd grab a simple, non-tech glass to drink his holy wine....
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