Fred Cossard (Burgundy)

Fred Cossard in the cask roomSaint Romain, Côte de Beaune (Burgundy)
Fred Cossard is one of the new vintners of Burgundy. His wines have an appeal, they're alive and are an intense pleasure to drink, and I felt this trait immediately when I had my first bottle of Cossard, and it was one of his simplest cuvée, a Bourgogne Grand Ordinaire (the professionals say B.O.G. and it is a blend of Pinot Noir & Gamay), and I followed his wines ever since. This was love at first sight for this wine, and I learned later in full depth that Fred Cossard was making his wines on the most natural way, and without any additives including SO2. What counts most here is this particular feel of life and joy that these wines show, ant it happens that it often comes with the winemaking practices and vineyard managements associated with natural wine... At the end, the important thing is what is in the glass, and you just finish these bottles right away, that's all the difference...
Fred Cossard doesn't come from a family of vignerons, his father was in the milk trade. He found his way to the wine world almost naturally if not directly, after studying first in a milk school then doing other things including working shortly as an independant wine dealer. It helped him know the culture of wine in Burgundy, with the different style of wines and he also met many vignerons in the process. Of what he learned in his young years in the milk trade, some things helped him later, like the need of a strict hygiene which is so important for the natural winemaking using no SO2 at all.

The Domaine de Chassorney's new facilityThe Domaine de Chassorney winery has a vineyard surface of 6,5/7 hectares. It lies a kilometer away from the nice village of Saint Romain on the Côtes de Beaune. In winter it's austere and still so beautiful, and I encourage people to brave the winter misery and drive through the back roads of the region and stop in the villages and hamlets.
After having left the small départementale road for a dirt road, you reach the buildings after a few more hundred meters, after passing a cute trailer under an oak tree [pic on right - you can see the winery in the far on the left]. The facility sits between a tree-bordered stream and the foothill, with a few vineyards further on the slopes. There's a small pond with its shack, a couple of dogs and horses, the whole setting feels great. When I arrived, Fred Cossard was on his way but not still arrived, and Nicolas Testard [in the background on the picture on left] was busy with two people packing pallets of his cuvée Kame which was bound for Japan. Nicolas Testard is a young Beaujolais vintner who works occasionally with Fred Cossard (his own facility is only 100 km away) and I remember having had a very nice Beaujolais Nouveau a couple years ago at Le Vin en Tête wine shop whose name was Lapin. It was from Testard but vinified by Fred Cossard, and from the instant poll of drinkers around me then, it was the best among the 5 Bojos that were offered a try. The Lapin (rabbit) is a fast-running animal, the meaning is that the wine was to be rushed to japan to be drunk there rapidly. Kame means turtle in Japanese, meaning that this Beaujolais is not necessarily for rapid consumption like Beaujolais-Nouveaux are. Like the Cuvée Lapin, it's entirely exported to Japan. This cuvée is also SO2 free. I missed an opportunity here as I forgot to ask for the priviledge to buy a few bottles of these, they were probably very good-value wines...Grenier vats temporarily stored outsideThere were a handful of wooden vats sitting outside along the stream with their plastic protection. I had barely the time to shot a few pictures there and walk to the horses who were radiating freedom and happiness in spite of the cold, and Fred Cossard arrived in his van. He and his family live in the village of Saint Romain, that's where he vinified and kept his wines too, but he was in dire need of space and resorted to build this modern building.
He explains to me the very beginning of this adventure : he started the Domaine de Chassorney in 1996, he rented a facility in Saint Romain, then in 1997 he could through Mr Jean François, who is a cooper, work in a cellar in the village center, then in 1998 he found a whole house for sale in Saint Romain, whith a beatiful vaulted cellar underneath, and that's where he and his family lived and where he made, cellared and bottled the wines, but the estate was smaller than now. As they grew in surface, he had the opportunity to buy this place which was at the time a disused pig farm, it was very particular, the roof was very low, they had to work a lot on the buildinfg and ground to make it usable, that's why there were few buyers interested prior to him. Among the work they disinfected the place naturally__ he stops and repeats naturally, underlying that for the disinfection of what was to become a winery, he didn't use chemical detergents but worked on the Ph and he did that with a friend, who prepared organic sprayings and bacterias to softly neutralize what the former activity of the pig farm had changed in the building and its surroundings. After running a layer of cement and insulating the building, he had a good-size building where he could do everything on the same level. Now he is digging into the foothill behind the facility [picture on right] to make a 250 square-meter cellar almost fully underground and at the same time on the street level.Winery toolsWe walk to the "cave à blancs", the white-wines cellar, a large cask room with gravel on the ground and casks lined on both sides. It is temperature controlled and right now the temperature is set at maybe 16°C-17°C, the alcoholic fermentations are not completed and the malo will come in their time. These wines will stay in casks till minimum next september (2010) to maximum january 2011. Fred Cossard is known for his long fermentation and macerations, so I ask him about it. He says that for the reds he has routinely 5 to 6 weeks of maceration with whole clusters unloaded in wooden tronconic vats like the ones pictured above. And systematicly, for his reds, when he devats the wine, the malolactic fermentations are completed. He says that compared with the traditional winemaking practice which goes through a sulphur addition in the vats and where the malo-ferm will come later during the elevage in casks, he gains almost a year of elevage in time. Here, the malolactic fermentation starts by itself in the vats with the wine sitting sulphur-free on its thick lees. He says that some people argue that the conventional way is better because the longer the malo-ferm, the better the wines will taste, but he is not convinced of that. He says that the reputation of Burgundy wines was made at a time no sulphur was ever added in the wines; maybe people used to drink thev wines the folowing year then, but he considers that when a wine is good, it's good early, and when the wine is not good, it often doesn't help to wait many years.A submarine-looking Chemo vat for the gravity bottlingDomaine de Chassorney's vineyards The casks are new and one-, two- or three-year old. Another interesting thing to note is that they now don't even sulphur the casks before use (with a sulphur wick) : they sterilize them with negative oxygen thanks to a tool than changes the oxygen into O3. This negative-oxygen generator is made by Vect'oeur, a high-tech company based in Beaune (I remember having seen this system in use at Simon Bize). So, when they get a cask, they fill it with water first and then, for about 10 minutes per cask, the de-ionizator will clean the container prior to its vinous use (they do it once per month as long as there's no wine in them). They also use this tool for larger vats including stainless-steel. Another thing of interest here, and that's where you see that hygiene is as tight here as in a milk lab, the water that they use for these simple washing tasks is tightly filtered beforehand : What you see on the picture on the left is a filtering system deemed to remove any undesired bacterias as well as the chlorine from the water so that no unchecked residues in the water can harm the microbian life of the juice and the wine. The fact that the vinification is sulphur-free here asks for a very careful handling and hygiene, they keep the microbian diversity of the grapes with the wild yeasts but watch for any outside "pollution" or any potentially harmful microbian influence.
For the whites, the fermentation takes place in the casks, there is no racking of the must after the press stage, the press is pneumatic and as it is soft, the juices are very "clean" and can go directly to the casks without prior racking. Fred Cossard says that he lets the juice oxydate quite a long time under the press, before the alcoholic fermentation starts : this alcoholic fermentation creates oxydase in the juice, and in the mean time it will neutralize the primary oxydation, he explains that this process will strenghten the natural immunization of the future wine against the oxydation. He says that when a press is completed, the foam under the press has the color of chocolate, which is anathema for the academical enology. In the vat room All this winemaking practices, says Fred Cossard, are only possible because of the organic quality of the grapes they get in the vineyards.
Back to the wine, and particularly the white wines : Once in the casks to ferment, they get no stirring at all during their cask time. He considers that the stirring has often to do with the fact that the vignerons added lots of lab yeasts in their juice to speed the alcoholic fermentations, which as a consequence brought down the lees in the bottom very quickly. With a non-interventionist fermentation on the wild yeasts, there is a natural stirring going on by itself in the juice thanks to this micro-fermentation which will take 3, 4, 5, sometimes 6 months in total. Everything is in suspension in the juice and they keep turbid. To go into the detail, after they fill the casks, they cut the access to the oxygen by using special plastic bungs (also made by Vect'oeur in Beaune), because it seems that the usual silicon or wooden bungs with the usual piece of cloth supposed to airtight the whole thing are actually potential transmitters of TCA, TeCA, oxygen and other undesired aromas. Chassorney's Saint-Romain Sous Roche (Pinot Noir) Wen the juice/wine is in its cask, the cask room is set at a temperature of about 10°C, then it's just topped every week. The low temperature will slow the alcoholic fermentation, but the thing is not to have it stopped too because at the end this juice must have turned into wine, it has to go to this stage slowly. This slow transformation of the juice into wine, he says, goes through several stages which have to be respected : there's one stage where the juice has a certain concentration in yeasts and sugar, with a family of yeasts which will have the task of beginning to eat the sugar and then will die off and leave the place to another yeast population which will further the job. That's how he sees the winemaking : if a climat is to find its own expression in a wine, the transmutation between the wild yeasts and the sugar must be done smoothly and with balance. He uses the modern technique of setting the caskroom temperature at 10°C because in the past the harvest season was much later than today, and because the cellars were very cold all throughout winter, the fermentations routinely making a halt during the cold months and setting off again the following spring. At 12°C they're just in the fermentation limit, and below 11°C normally nothing moves in the juice. Now, when we speak together in the cask room it's set at 15-16°C because as the harvest was stretched over 3 weeks/a month, there has been some disconnect between the fermentations of the different casks, so he brings them on the same rhythm through this higher temperature. Fred Cossard on his old-time vineyard "Le Cerisier" The following september, when the alcoholic and malolactic fermentations are finished, the wines are racked and blended in a vat in a cool cellar so that the wine can redeposit quietly, and then the wine can be pumped from the aboce and bottled. They leave the thick lees in the bottom of the vat and as they didn't add any SO2, they can use this vat bottom for another wine. There's been no fining and no filtration and this wine has always had an exchange with its lees. There's also lots of CO2 in the wine : for example for the 2008 whites they made checks and saw that there was between 1600 and 1800 mg of natural CO2 per liter, which is very interesting because the CO2 is an anti-oxydant which protects the wine. Before bottling, they will just de-gaze the wine a bit by exposing the wine shortly to the air, and the CO2 level at bottling will still be relatively high, like 1200-1300 mg/liter. The aeration is done for example when they fill the elevated vat through a hose, the vat being used for the bottling being forklifted a few meters high to easily fill the bottles by gravity. For comparison, a conventional winery will have much lower CO2, like he says, Duboeuf bottles his Beaujolais Primeurs at 800-900. The first year, these wines will be a bit perly, but the with time the CO2 will melt into the wine and after another year or so this perly feel will pass. Fred Cossard says also that to make good wines without SO2 addings, you need to have two factors together : the alcohol level and the Ph : if the acidity lacks, you are going to get heavier wines which lack tonicity. Speaking of acidity, I ask if 2009 was a good acidic year for the wines, he answer yes. And is there a climate particularity in Saint Romain ? he says no : if in the past Saint-Romain, he says, whites were said to have a taste of flint stones here, it's because the grapes were harvested way too early then, the chais weren't temperature-controlled, the fermentations were very long in the chais and that's why. When a MF (malo-ferm) starts when the AF is not yet completed, it will develop acids which will be complementary with what the wine will yield at the end of the AF. The analysis of his wines show data which don't fit in the frame of the academical (or conventional) enology, like total-acidity levels or ph between and after MF which are very similar. And the first thing to count, he says, is the quality of the vineyard and of the grapes. The winemaking will be easy if the fruits are great. He says that for the last two vintages (2008 & 2009) they were very lucky and the quality was such that they didn't even have to use the sorting tables (the pickers did the easy sorting on the vines). The quality of 2009 is incredible, he says, the last vintage where he saw such a quality was 1990. Vineyards near Saint Romain Asked about where he learned to resort to all these strict hygiene measures that I see in the chai, he answers that he attended to a milk-industry school in his young years where he studied biology and micro-biology, and there's even more complexity in the milk, so he learned that hygiene was essential. And he makes an interesting parallel here between raw-milk cheese and sulphur-free wine : both are considered as impossible to make by the industry-minded professionals of each branch and he just laughs at this mental frilosity. With his winemaking style, he says that risks are taken compared with the conventional practices but the result is rewarding, and he likes the idea of pursuing a Graal and keeping looking for perfection; he says that he learned a lot after making mistakes himself in the early years.
His very first vinification tries were in friend's chais and then at his then-mother-in-law, in 1984-1985 and he learned all the way until the setting-up of the Domaine de Chassorney in 1996.
We leave the winery for a short visit through the vineyards. The wines made by Chassorney are Bourgogne Rouge, Bourgogne Blanc, Saint Romain Rouge, Saint Romain Blanc, Auxey-Duresses Rouge, Auxey-Duresses Blanc and Savigny les Beaune. He used to get grapes from in Nuits-Saint-Georges but not anymore. He has only rented vineyards (9-year or 18-year baux ruraux), he says that he began with no financial backing and renting was the solution. Now he may look for vineyard to buy but the prices have shot up for a few years.
He also set up this Négoce with his wife Laure., it allows them to make many other Appellations but with the same spirit than with Chassorney's wines. They buy the grapes and the grower has a road book for the vineyard management (organic of course), plus they themselves also work in these vineyards.
As we drive through the vineyard landscape, Fred Cossard notes that many workers already prune the vineyard in spite of this very cold weather, as we spot the white fumes here and there. he says that it's not good for the vine, and at Chassorney, he does the pruning later in the season, first it's less harmful for the vine, then he chooses the best time, when the sap goes up early march.
He makes certain biodynamic-style treatments on the vineyards which are not exactly the ones Steiner advocated. We pass a vineyards on a slope and he points to it saying that this one is plowed with the horse because the slope bends on the wrong side for a tractor. He says that he does the earthing-up under the vines later than the others so that it spares several tractor sessions. We pass a 75-year-old Chardonnay vineyard, with vines very close to each other (he says it's 10 000 vines/ha). Further, he shows a vineyard that he remembers having planted in mayb 1998 (on the 20th & 21th he says) : he remembers exactly because he missed an enduro motorcycle race (world championships) in Nuits-Saint-Georges that weekend but as this was the perfect moon to plant he couldn't assist and he doesn't regret it because the vineyards yields very beautiful grapes.
We drank some wine at the end of this visit but check on this Burgundy tasting for tasting notes.
Fred Cossard's wines are exported to several countries and particularly to Japan.Domaine de Chassorney21190 Saint Romainphone +33 3 80 21 65 55fax + 33 3 80 21 67 44chassorney [at] orange [dot] frwww.chassorney.com Here is another piece of video, shot very near Saint Romain, in a back valley where there's a hamlet named Maitranceaux. I don't know if it's the black horse (there was no black dog available) , the ruins or the water (I didn't check if there were odd objects in the bottom of the stream), but I feel that I'm inching ever closer to the universe of Tarkovski's movie Stalker....;-)
Speaking of cinema, there was this sad news recently that Eric Rohmer died. His movies are surprising the first time you see one (I didn't catch with them immediately myself), they're quiet, there no music background, no visual tricks , the characters are filmed in long sequences while they interact between themselves with their feelings and emotions. And though, these movies are so much alive and fresh, and they leave a vibrant aftertaste (all this has vinous resonances). Eric Rohmer gets many compliments today but during his life he has been a bit shunned by the intellectual circles in Paris for being resolutely out of the flock and somehow conservative in spite of his taking part in the Nouvelle Vague of the young French film-makers in the 1950s'. His movie about the French revolution shows him as a rare voice to consider this revolution more like the mother of all totalitarian ideologies than the originator of the vaunted Declaration of Human Rights.

Comments

[Tom Fiorina]

Your video shot near Saint Romain is quite beautiful, and it does have the same luminosity and eeriness of the film that you mentioned (I wasn't familiar with this director's work, but I certainly think that I would enjoy viewing his films). You just need some strange music, a little dialogue, and you'd be set for Cannes. One question about your video: were you on foot or on your motorcycle when you shot it? I would guess on foot, judging from the speed at which you advance, and the slight camera shake. It's not easy to film as you move forward like this. You're fortunate to not have ended up in the stream at the bottom of that ravine ;-). And around three minutes into the video, we hear a car or truck approaching. I half expected you to be carried off--Tex Avery-style, on the bumper of a La Poste truck. Thanks for your excellent writing and images. They're much appreciated.

[Bertrand]

Thanks for the encouragement, Tom, I feel Cannes is getting near... Yes, I was on foot, I'd need a better image stabilizator and that would make the trick..
Bert

[Kenji Hodgson]

Bertrand,
Thank you for this extremely insightful report.
I find it very interesting that Mr Cossard does not remove the juice from its lees after pressing. Some wine growers who I've met in the Loire (they generally happen to be ones you cover on this website) operate in a similar fashion, and from what I have tasted, their wines don't suffer the 'heinous' effects that the textbooks warn one about if juice racking is disregarded.
One question, do you know if Mr Cossard forgoes SO2 at bottling as well?

By the way, my wife is the biggest Eric Rohmer fan I have ever met. We had to make a special trip to St Jean de Luz just to visit the "Rayon Vert" store. Though we are busy pruning vines in Faye d'Anjou, she is ready to jump on a train to Paris at the first news of a Rohmer tribute screening.
Kenji

[gottfried]

great article again