Domaine de la Butte (Loire)

Jacky Blot above the Mi-Pente vineyardBourgueil, Bourgueil AOC (Loire)
Jacky Blot's Cabernet-Franc wines from his Domaine de la Butte in Bourgueil are among the best-valued reds of the Loire valley. Bourgueil is of course Cabernet-Franc country, and the region seems to suit this variety very well. With the mild weather and when possible the right terroir, it turns into very beautiful wines that can compete with the two more prestigious regions that are Burgundy and Bordeaux. Somehow Jacky Blot succeeded in keeping reasonable wine prices in spite of a vineyard farming which is conducted quite as meticulously as the one of Grands Crus of Bordeaux or Burgundy. Back in 2004 when we visited Jacky Blot, we only saw shortly the Domaine de la Taille aux Loups in Montlouis where the whites are made, the two estates (la Taille aux Loups & Domaine de la Butte) being about 70 kilometers apart from each other. As I wrote in this 2004 visit report, Jacky Blot was initially in the wine trade, he was a wine broker in Tours. He decided at sme point to make wine himself and bought 8 hectares of old vineyards in Montlouis, a Loire Appellation which was at the time (some 22 years ago) shadowed by the better-known Vouvray. His low yields, short pruning and minimal-amount of sulphur at the fermentation changed the reputation of the Montlouis wines for the best and he can be credited for giving this white-wine Appellation a much higher status.

The narrow road to Domaine de la Butte Jacky Blot owned the Domaine de la Taille aux Loups in Montlouis for a few years when he had this unexpected opportunity in 2002 : a 15-hectare estate in one block on the best slopes of Bourgueil, and in addition, an incredibly beautiful, large and cool cellar underneath. He had been quietly looking for good terroirs and soils suited for great Cabernet-Franc wines, and here they were, almost on a tray. You see Cabernet-Franc vineyards everywhere in the region, including in the flatland, but if you want to make a wine that stands out, the location is very important. When he purchased the estate in 2002, it had been farmed organic for 4 years, that is since 1998, and he kept working along this line.
The Domaine de la Butte is (on the picture above) the group of vineyards around and above the house in the far, at the end of this bucolic road passing along this generous cherry tree. It's maybe only a couple of kilometers from the first houses of Bourgueil but once there it looks like being very remote.
They purchased the estate in time for the havest of 2002. In terms of vineyard surface, they didn't change it, it's still 15 hectares of reds today. Most vines are old, but what made this estate great was the quality of its terroir : 15 hectares in one block on a unique situation : on slopes with probably the best undersoil. He says that nobody around has the chance to have such a cumulative situation. If there are some vineyard on slopes in Bourgueil (60%), in Saint-Nicolas de Bourgueil (this later Appellation starts very close from Domaine de la Butte) most vineyards are in the plain and only 10% on slopes. The general public doesn't know these difference but the keen wine amateur knows that the great terroirs are on Bourgueil, that's also where good vignerons are, the ones in the St-Nicolas de Bourgueil area being more of the mass-bottler style selling to the supermarkets. Looking down from above the Mi-PenteSpeaking of the Appellation limits between Bourgueil and Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, the odd thing is that it is a vertical line going down the slope further on the right, meaning that a few slopes are part of the wholly flatland of St-Nicolas, when it would have been wiser to create an Appellation with all the plain and another clearly more qualitative with slopes only. Here, with the 10% of slopes which are part of St-Nicolas, there could be made some better wine than its plain equivalent. There's no real justification in the way the line has been drawn between the two areas.
We walk up the dirt path behind the old house and winery toward the upper slopes. From up there we can see far away, Restigné on the left, and the Loire valley with Chinon and its Nuclear power plant of which we spot the fumes. We're on the right bank of the Loire, and the valley is wide, we can't really see the river.
Asked about the good quality/value ratio of his wines, something that took my attention long time ago and that Eric Asimov also noticed in his recent piece about Wine bargains of the Loire [a 16 $ bottle from La Butte was rated 1st by the NY Times panel on a list of 10 Loire reds], Jacky Blot says that in spite of a rigorous work in the vineyard comparable to what is done in the best Crus of Burgundy or Bordeaux, he feels like a man of the Loire, a region where vignerons keep a lower profile and don't live a flashy and glitzy life, and that's how he can keep his wines affordable in regard of the quality. He says that if you consider the real cost price for him of a bottle of wine, it's basically very close from the Grands Chateaux of Bordeaux, but here, there's no flashy real estate and way of life to entertain, no helicopters and the likes, and it makes a difference. Les Perrières (behind van)- Mi-Pente in the foreground I notice that the vineyards of Domaine de la Butte are either running along the slope, or parallel to the hill. Jacky blot says that the reason why is that some of the vineyards here, like the mi-pente, have been planted at a time when draft horses were used between the rows, and at that time it was generally considered better for the horse to work along an even altitude, as opposed to walking up and down the slope with the plow behind. Today, plantings are usually made following the slope, it's even safer as the tractor doesn't risk to tilt on the side. The Haut de la Butte vineyard (picture on left) which sits just under the wooded cap of the hill, is planted this way, going down the slope. The lower part of the estate, just under the house, has an altitude of 50 meters while the higher "haut de la butte" sits at 100 meters. [ Note : Haut de la Butte means upper slope, Mi-Pente means mid-slope and Pied de la Butte means foothill or lower slope ]. The whole vineyard of the estate sits on what was long time ago, maybe a million years ago, a Loire bank, the plain underneath was underwater then. There are several river beds, the one of the 1st glaciation and the one of the 2nd, and the vineyards growing on these different soils don't give the same wines, the more rencent deposit giving easy, thirst wines while the slope soils which have several layers of geological deposits produce the best wines. That's on the whole, but he adds that when the Loire moved along this wide valley, it took away here and there part of the deposits which translates today in very different soils along the same slope. What can be said is that there are three main zones : the best is in the middle of the slope, that's what he calls mi-pente in his estate. It's a bit like the Grand Cru in Burgundy, it's the same positioning along the slope. The equivalent of the Premier Cru is at the top of the slope under the woods (Haut de la Butte), and the equivalent of the Appellation Communale is down the slope (Pied de la Butte). Perrières has the same qualitative soil than the mi-pente, but it's slightly on the side on a wavy hill below. The Haut de la Butte vineyard on the left is 15-20 years old.
I notice several missing vines, there's some esca loss here and there. He replants with massal selections (picture on right), not their own (they do their own in Montlouis for the Chenin) but they are made by someone in the Appellation who has been doing a very good job in that regard. It allowed him to spare time and begin replant quicker (it take a few years to make the right selection before the final result and the replantings). On the mi-pente with workersJacky Blot says that the best Terroirs of Touraine are on Turonian soil (turonien supérieur), the last sedimental layer when the water receded, with sediments 90-million-years old. Montlouis and Vouvray also have this Turonian soil with limestone. We have 300 meters thick of sediments around here accumulated along a 150-million-year span with water everywhere. In Montlouis, there's one kilometer deep of deposits. Mi-pente has a 20-meter thick layer underneath, now, it's not easy to explain but some parts of the vineyard show traces of different layers and ages depending of the tectonic movements that shaped the area and the slopes. Many stones on the vineyard on the upper slope show sedimented pieces of shells. This isn't limestone, the limestone is a few meters deeper, this is a hard stone made of compacted sediments dating from the Paleocene and the Eocene, it's 30 to 40 million years old. Some geological layers on the estate come from far away, from the central mountains of today's France. The different cuvées that they make here, the Haut de la Butte, Mi-Pente and Pied de la Butte are all related to a different terroir, it is not just to seperate plots depending of the position on the slope, the undersoil is radically different on each of them. This is very similar to the concept of climat which is used in Burgundy.
The vineyard of Domaine de la Butte is farmed without pesticides and insecticides, including the organic ones that Jacky Blot considers as also endangering the insect balance. He prefers the pheromons. Three workers work on the vineyard side year around, for the pruning, the plowing and so on. The early care of the vine is very important, to make the right pruning and de-budding because he considers the adjustment with green harvest wrong : the vine had worked for nothing and what went (the sap and energy) into these prematurely-picked grapes is lost. We chat a few minutes with 2 workers who work on mi-pente. Right now, this is the season of three tasks : ebassillage, ébourgeonage (debudding) and épamprage (taking off the leaves growing on the foot). The density is 5000 vines hectares here. He says that it's not bad for this Appellation, it's well sized for their type of tractors and tools. For their whites they have a 6600 vines/hectare density. Here on their reds they still have low yields like 30 hectoliter/hectares in general.
They have some large animals like roe deers and wild boars coming here at times and eating the grapes. Jacky Blot didn't put an electrified wire around the vineyard, but a simple red-and-white tape and it works more or less to limit the damage. One thing they noticed once, it is that wild boars came to their Perrières plot (second picture above, behind the white van) and played with the earth and mud like they like to, but they didn't touch the vineyard on the left which is conventionally farmed (you can see on the picture by the color that the vineyard and its ground are very different) because the ground is dead and stone hard. We walk to Les Perrières, it's very different from the other plots, no stones, clayish soil. The vineyards are maybe 40 years old or more. The cellar galleries of Domaine de la ButteWhen you walk into the chai and cellar behind the house, you discover an outstanding underground facility. Its large door opening dug through the surfacing cliff is wide enough for a vehicule. The ceiling is at times low, at times very high, particularly in the first room where the fermentation vats, wood and cement, are lined on both sides of the gallery which goes down toward the center of the hill. The previous owner had done a lot of work and investment there and the result is this great cool cellar which is probably home to a large population of natural yeasts. Asked about the work on the wines there, Jacky Blot says that contrary to the vineyard side where there's a lot that they do to help, here in the casks they don't do anything basically. Like for his whites, his goal when he settled in Bourgueil was to make red wines that would be made mostly in the vineyard. When the grapes are picked and put in the boxes, he considers that the wine is made. The following stage in the chai and cellar will be the result of the grape condition and will never get adjustments through additives, beginning with yeasts as the juice ferments on the natural yeasts of the grapes [and maybe the ones of the cellar walls help]. Speaking of the picking stage, there are three successive sortings of the grapes : one made by the picker who selects himself the grapes on the vine, a second one made on the sorting table which is set up at the end of the row so that the bad grapes dont'go further with the good ones. That when the selected grapes go into boxes. And a third one is made near the winery on a sophisticated sorting table with a blowing system. After this stage, the grapes are poured by gravity through an opening on a platform above the house (in the middle of the vineyard) to the large chai room (picture above). Looking down on the cask cellarThe large room with the vats (2nd pic above) is where the grapes arrive through a hole in the ceiling, the other end being on a smal cement platform in the middle of mi-pente. There are probably very few wineries where the distance and time between the vineyard/picking and the fermentation vat is smaller. Were're here in tuff (tuffeau in French), this soft chalky limestone which he says dates from the middle turonian era. Above our heads that's the lower part of the demi-pente vineyard, and in this area there's barely only 20 centimeters of earth before the tuff, which makes replantings very difficult because the first two years the new vine hasn't yet root hair long enough to catch the rare humidity.
At the end of the long chai with the vats on both sides, you arrive above the casks cellar which is composed of several communicating rooms. You must walk down steep cement stairs to reach the bottom level. Everything goes by gravity here, and the cask room being way below the vats, the wine flows easily from the chai to the cask cellar (see also last pic on bottom-left). The first casks down there are the 2009, the Haut de la Butte and the Mi Pente. The Pied de la Butte is already bottled and its élevage was made in stainless-steel vats (the ones you see in one of the pictures above).
Reaching the chai by gravity through the rock, the grapes go straight into the vats for the fermentation, the cement vats being for the lower-end cuvée and the Grenier wooden vats being for the upper cuvées. A cask cellar in the rockJacky Blot says that he was heartened recently to hear Bristol's sommelier Manuel Peyrondet, who was already a long-time lover of his Chenin wines from la Taille aux Loups, say that he is now also a convinced aficionado of his reds from la Butte. He tasted already 4 times the 2009 wines and said somewhere that the Pied de la Butte should be forbidden by the law because it's too good and pleasant to drink, adding also that the Mi-Pente 2008 was great, like a Sociando-Mallet (Haut-Médoc) but without the wood and much better...
__ Domaine de la Butte, Haut de la Butte 2009 (still in cask). Beautiful fruit on the nose. Cherry notes, a bit perly. Jacky Blot says that when it's ripe, its often on the cherry notes. They almost add no SO2, just a bit at the very beginning in the vat (2 grams), then only at bottling. After then, when the wine gets into the casks, there's a racking from time to time, the thickest part of the lees being removed. The mouth has a nice chew with lots of fruit.
__ Domaine de la Butte, Haut de la Butte 2009, other cask. I feel something more intense and complex on the nose. He hints that this particular cask is new, contrary to the previous (there are not many new casks in this cuvée). The nose was not woody, but the mouth has some wood notes indeed. It will be anyway be blended with the other casks, most of which are several wines old. There isn't much new wood in the haut de la butte, and the overall proportion of new casks in this cellar (the rest being Mi-Pente and Perrières) is 25%. The haut de la Butte stays one year in casks roughly, it's racked just before the harvest to make some room for the next wines. He says that they felt an important improvement in the quality of this cuvée since 2 or 3 years, which he credits to the fact that the vineyard's organic farming ended up its thorough transformation of the plants. He says that to get rid of the conventional-farming after-effects, it takes usually about 10 years to go round the corner, even if after already 5 years the first obvious results appear. Looking for a particular cask__ Domaine de la Butte , Les Perrières 2009. From a cask too. This vineyard is part of the central vein of the slope.This cuvée stays 15 months in casks, the bottling taking place before Christmas. The casks come from different cooperages but many come from Cadus. It's all French oak. The wine is more refined, it's obvious here, but I understand my limits in tasting from a cask a wine with potential which is in its early infancy. You got to have a lot of expertise to have a precise judgement here. Jacky Blot says that experience and memory count a lot, that's why it's important to taste a lot, including the baby wines. In the estate he is the one who tastes regularly the wines, even if other people in the staff taste too. They don't have any enology consultant to check the wines and they don't want any. They just want to make the wines they like and don't look for something technically better, it would not be his wines any more if he hired an enologist. When he began at La Taille aux Loups, he followed his instinct and made dry whites that nobody around was making. The American market is overwhelmed with awful Vouvray, most with 10 grams of residual sugar and blocked (mutés) with lots of SO2, there's mostly no dry Chenin there. There's the same bad line here than in Alsace with way too much sugar left in the wines, and he didn't follow this general trend, his Chenins at la Taille aux Loups are real dry wines. Asked if the indigenous yeasts don't tend to leave residual sugar because they're less active than industrial lab yeats, he says that not only he gives his wines the time to ferment quietly, but he adds that the wild yeats are very diverse, not of a single type like when you use lab yeasts. There are different yeast populations that work one after the other all along the process, and the type of yeasts that work when only a few grams of sugar remain are very different from the yeasts that worked at the beginning, all that brings more complexity. He adds that the wineries who use lab yeats buy the same yeasts and end up tailoring their wine with what the market or the highest number of people want. These are not real wines from a real place anymore.
__ Domaine de la Butte Perrières 2009, other cask (new cask). Darker color, it seems to me. Very beautiful nose, intense, notes of very ripe fruits. On Perrières the proportion is roughly 25% new, one half one-year old and 25% two-year old. As said, on the whole of this cellar, he buys 30 new casks every year, so he spreads them among the three cuvées which are aged in wood, a tiny number of new casks going to the Haut de la Butte (sometimes just to soften away the new-wood feel of certain casks so that the casks can be fit for the other cuvées the following years) and the rest for the two upper cuvées.
__ Domaine de la Butte Mi Pente 2009. Cask made with oak from Allier forest. Very nice legs on the glass. He has about 50 casks for the Mi Pente in 2009. Very beautiful wine, concentrated and oddly no noticeable woody side in spite of the new oak, for me at least. There's some astringency on the side of the mouth with the tannins, this wine is really in its infancy. He says that the discretion of the wood is the priviledge of this climat which can handle new oak without translating in a woody mouth. Technical detail : the grapes are destemmed in the Domaine de la Butte. The mi-Pente for example has its fermentation done in the Grenier open wooden vats for 10 to 15 days, then after it has another 15 days of maceration, making a total of a month in these vats. They usually don't regulate the temperature in these vats but keep the option if necessary. On the filtration/fining front, thre isn't any for these reds, except the Bas de la Butte. Now, he says that he is thinking about a possible change in that regard. The 2005 wines for example got a lot of deposits in the bottle, like several times more than, say, 2002. If the bottled is badly handled by a sommelier in a restaurant it may affect the enjoyment and the taste of the wine. So he is keeping options open on a possible light filtration )or maybe rather a light fining) in the future.
__ domaine de la Butte, Mi Pente 2009, other new cask, oak from the Tronçais forest. Obviously different mouth here, that I feel as expressing more freshness. All the casks will be blended at the end of course, but that was interesting to feel how two different quality of oaks (both being in the upper range though) make a difference. If I try to choose the one I prefer between the two, that would be the latter, but again, these wines are still at a very early stage and not ready for the consumer table. It will be bottled in a year from now. He says that it will be ideal to drink it in about 5 or 7 years, but regarding the quality of the tannins which are soft and ripe, it will be also great to drink earlier. This upper cuvée will be sold at 18 € public price at the winery which I think is a great value indeed.
A few days after this visit we had a dinner in Paris where we brought a bottle of Mi Pente 2002 that B. had bought during our 2004 visit. This was indeed a great pleasure, the wine was complex, smooth, suave and deep. Other people in our party who weren't particularly expert in wine noticed that this wine was outstanding. there was a bit of deposit in the last glass but it didn't affect the wine as far as I felt it.

The main export market is the UK. Asked if the financial meltdown had an impact on his sales, especially in the UK, he says that he didn't experience a downfall during this crisis, adding that since the beginning of 2010 the orders to the UK were 6 times higher compared to the same time last year. He thinks that the crisis was oddly a reward for his export sales because the consumer found extremely-good values in his Chenins from la Taille aux Loups or his Cabernet Francs from la Butte. A sommelier in London told him that for example a Remus (which cost 12 € public price at the winery) costs 60 € over there in a restaurant and is much better positionned than a Premier Cru of Puligny or Chassagne-Montrachet which are billed 120 or 150 €. Same for his Mi-Pente which is billed some 60 € in a London restaurant.
The wines are sold at the estate and to the caviste and restaurants (upper-tier restaurants). 20 % of the wines are exported.
Uk : Justerini & Brooks, Fields, Morris & Verdin.
United States : Adventures in Wine (CA), VOS Selections (NY), Vin de Garde Wines (OR), Country Vintner.
Canada : SAQ and LCBO.
Japan : Le Petit Tonneau Wine.
Belgium : Vine Devos NV, Terre & Vin.
Holland : Vinities BV, Wijnimport Van Broekhuizen, Noordman Wijnimport.
Switzerland : La Couleur du Vin, Caveau de Bacchus (Genève). Domaine de la ButteChemin de la Butte37140 BourgueilPhone (taille aux Loups) : + 33 2 47 45 11 11fax (T aux L) : +33 2 47 45 11 14 www.jackyblot.frThe tasting room and shop are located at the Domaine de la Taille aux Loups in Husseau near Montlouis. Domaine de la Butte doesn't receive visitors without appointment. 26 :22

Comments

[JC Campione]

Great article with wonderful photos. Thank you for bringing a better understanding of French wine making into my home.

[hikalu]

It seems that I can get 2004. I will try it.