Pierre Beauger, Auvergne (Loire)

Pierre Beauger in his cellar in Jussat Jussat-Chanonat/Champeix, Auvergne (Loire - bottom-right of this map)
The first one who told me about Pierre Beauger was Pierre Jancou at Racines, and it was in almost lyrical tones : this vigneron who started his winery in 2001 was making extremely pure wines, if atypical, on the slopes of the Massif Central in Auvergne right near Gergovia (located near the village of La Roche Blanche) where the Gallic armies led by their chief Vercingetorix defeated the Roman army with Julius Caesar at its head in 52 B.C. Beyond the symbolic resonance of the area, Pierre Beauger happens to be a vigneron who works hard to revive the vineyards of the region, making wine on the most uninterventionist way on terraced slopes which were planted with vines long, long time ago.
Pierre Beauger is a native from Auvergne, and he has a brother and a sister. His father was raised in the multi-crop 7-hectare family farm, working with his own father, but he later started a negoce of his own dealing with garlic (Auvergne is known for its qualitative garlic) because the farm was too modest to make a living. Pierre Beauger put his roots back into the farm life with this winery (which he started in 2001), but his father, who is now 78, helps him all along for the vineyard tasks.

Showing his vines on his Champeix terraces Pierre Beauger rents about 3 hectares of what was until recently fallow land near the village of Champeix. The village administration lets him the use of the bushy terraces which used to be exploited long time ago. There was a lot of work before these plots could return to their vineyard use. The terraces are kept from erosion by walls that the farmers had built patiently, with stairs and stone huts here and there to walk from one to the next and store tools (see pics on right and left). The altitude of these terraced plots goes from 500 to 620 meters. He and his father began to plant the top of the slope since 2004 and today, in 2010, 1,4 hectare of this rented surface is planted with vines. When he took control of this slope, mother nature had taken back the terraces and you could hardly guess the walls behind the bushes and trees. He kept some of them for the diversity, and as I walked through some of his yet-to-be-cleared terraces I was struck by the variety of flowers and wild plants, and again like in much of Auvergne, there were many cherry trees. The rent for these terrains communaux (communal lands) is very cheap but the village head was interested in Pierre Beauger's will to bring these old terraces back into farming life, especially that he works organicly. Pierre says that these plots were all planted in vineyards in the past, with also here and there fruit trees complanted like it used to be in the past. He says that the hills were mostly terraced in the region then, and many of the large fields around have been made possible by the levelling of the terraces with modern machinery. These particular terraces were spared because the slope was too steep for tractors and more recently, because the village decided to protect this heritage.
As said in an earlier post, the vineyard surface went down sharply in the region following the unfolding of different events : the phylloxera (which reached the region later than the other French regions), WW1 (which took away the men tending the vines, many never coming back), the transportation improvements (which brought all over France cheap wine from the south) and the setting up of the Michelin industry (based near Clermont Ferrand, it was a magnet for workers and it paid much better than growing vines). Pierre Beauger and his father - Montaigut le Blanc in the background Pierre Beauger now lives in the village of Montaigut-le-Blanc, which you can see in the background on the picture above, with the impressive Sancy mountains further in the back. He bought a house there with his wife, who is a freelance grafic artist. They set up a gîte there, that is, they rent a renovated part of this house to visitors for the weekend or the week. It helps pay for other expenses. He will make room for his chai and cellar there soon and stop using the facility that he rents in Jussat, 20 kilometers from here.
He says that the region had also lots of coal mines in the past, and the Auvergnats who emigrated to Paris a century ago or earlier used to make a living selling both coal and wine from their humble street shops to the Parisians. These were the famed bougnats and their blackened pick-up trucks still roamed the streets of Paris loaded with jute bags full of coal well into the early 1970s'. Many of these bougnats got rich later when their business grew up in the café and bar sector.
We walk through the different vineyard of this slope. Some were planted in 2004, others in 2007 and there are also very young vines that were planted a few weeks ago. He is working the ground now and then with a walk-behind self-powered plower but he is thinking to get an animal, a draft horse maybe to intervene on the ground. He planted with a distance of 1,2 meters between the rows, which should be fine for a horse, he says that horses routinely work with as little as 90 centimeters between rows. He planted at 1,2 meter because when the vines age, they get twisted in strange shapes sometimes, and also because it is easier to find plows with a width of 1 or 1,2 meters. Otherwise, the vines are 1 meter from each other along a row, making a theorical density of 8333 vines/hectare. He also planted a plot near the one we're walking through at 80 centimeters between vines along the row, making a density between 10 000 and 11 000 vines/hectare. This, for yields that he plans to be between 30 and 40 hectoliters/hectare maximum. He is far below 40 ho/ha right now because his vines are still young anyway. He says that this yields question has to be handled carefully : for example if someone makes yields of 40 hectoliters/hectare with only 4000 vines per hectare, each vine will have quite a big load of grapes and the wines will turn out very different from say, a 10 000-vines/hectare vineyard with the same overall yields.

We drove 20 kilometers from these terraced vineyards to Jussat, where Pierre Beauger rents his cellar his cellar, and near which he also rents a vineyard of Chardonnay (picture on left), on a slope named les Malettes. This is right near Chanonat where former French president Giscard d'Estaing had his family home (he sold and moved recently). Pierre Beauger jokes that he loudly opposed some of Giscard d'Estaing's initiatives, like the European constitution referendum in 2005. Along with this 24-year-old Chardonnay vineyard on marls and basalt, he rents also 0,3 hectare of Gamay in the vicinity, plus 0,65 hectare on another slope. As he bought recently a building in Montaigut-le-Blanc where he'll move his facility, he'll let down these vineyards to limit the driving, centering on his terraces and on vineyards close to his future facility. Outside his chai and cellar in Jussat (background on right)Pierre Beauger invested a lot in the clearing and replanting of the terraces, beginning with the new vines which cost 1,5 € apiece. These newly planted vines need some time and care before yielding grapes, but he is confident to make enough grapes in the near future. He didn't ask any subvention for his investments, he wanted to stay free from any pressure or direction that mighrt come along with the subsidies from the state agricultual bodies. He refused for example the Dotation Jeune Agriculteur which is a special grant for young farmers. This grant comes with strings attached, like the obligation to make such or such minimal revenue after a few years, and other rules forcing the subsidized farmer to manage his farm on a square way along the Chambre d'Agriculture guidelines and so on. The problem is also that if you don't comply with all the rules you may have to pay back the subsidy. But overall, he wanted to manage his burgeoning winery and vineyard his own way, without a financial or regulatory minder behind him to impose rules directly or indirectly. He considers that these financial subsidies are in part a way to lure the farmer into a type of agriculture which is not the one he wants do develop. This very yearning for freedom made him prefer to never present his wines for the agrément, the special commission which gives or refuses the Appellation status to the wines. [For those who still ignore it, the agreement commissions are managed by fellow vignerons and as they're usually conventional winemakers and growers, they tend to give the green flag to same-minded vignerons and wines, that is to wines that have been squarely formatted by additives and technological corrections.]. Pierre Beauger doesn't look for an Appellation like Côtes d'Auvergne (in spite of the keen artisanship with which he manages his vineyard and raises his wines) and he bottles all the cuvées as table wine, as what will be known in the near future as vin sans IGP or "wine without protected geographical indication" [the French administrations love these acronyms, that's why they invent new ones, I guess]. He considers that this Appellation thing is also questionable when you think that maybe 99% of the vigneron who take part use insecticides or Roundup or Basta, or the éclaircissage chimique (a chemical spraying designed to limit the number of clusters), in addition to all the other additives.
Although he farms organicly, he didn't join an organic certification. He is wary of the certifications, partly because the big wineries try to soften the rules so that they can sell their wines under the label allthewhile keeping working in the vineyard and the cellar with products. Pierre Beauger is part of the French natural-wine movement AVN and they tried at the AVN to set up a chart that would be presented to the French and European wine authorities and which would take into account more precisely the products allowed in the vineyard and bar the use of all the cellar additives. Today's organic certification leave the unscrupulous winemakers free to use all the technological additives to correct and adjust their wines, which is nonsense. This AVN project didn't get anywhere because there was hindering resistance in the administrations managing these questions. The surface chai in Jussat His plantings were made with massal selections (by the way, if he had accepted the subsidies system, he would have had to plant clones). On the massal-selection question also, he says that one has to do it right : if you take the selections from a high-yield type of vine, you're making a disservice to the well-thought viticulture you're supposed to look for. The criteria of your selection are important, it's not a miracle solution by itself.
At one point in a Pinot-Gris vineyard we walk past a walk-behind sprayer that we call in French atomiseur. Pierre Beauger uses it for spraying copper dilutions, or sulphur, or plant decoctions. He's not yet fully into the use of plant-decoction sprayings and he will learn more. Once he had Michel Augé [a Loire grower who is a specialist on the question of biodynamic preparations]with him here to help prepare this type of homeopatic spraying. Until now he has made one and a half preventive treatment for disease in all, this year. The newly-planted vineyard on the left is Pinot Noir. He had to put a net around it because of the rabbits who wouldn't otherwise leave much of the baby vines. There are no wild boars around here but occasionally some roe deers.
The good thing with these terraces which were abandonned long time ago is that these grounds never had any insecticides or weedkillers sprayed, and the diversity and health of the various plants is striking. He has some friends whose job is to pick wild plants for research- or pharmaceutical labs who come here to take samples of interesting plants like for example fumeterre, millepertuis or sage. These cueilleurs (that's how these professional plant pickers are named) help him in return to prepare plant decoctions for his vineyard. Pierre Beauger stops talking at one point and listens to a tiny noise coming from the bushes around : he says that there is an indigenous cicada in Auvergne, with a very different song compared with the familiar Provencal type. He finds routinely cicada sloughs around here. In the cask cellar in JussatWe drove to Jussat where Pierre Beauger rents his facility in the center of the village. The chai is a large room on the surface and the cellar looks like the two other cellars that I visited in Auvergne : a single, wide vaulted room that we reach using similarly-positionned stairs, straight and centered at one end of the tube-like room. Very cool cellar again, without any cooling system.
For the record, Pierre Beauger wanted to be a farmer from his youngest age. He went to an agriculture/cattle school and later, as he was pondering over which specialization to follow for his BTS diploma, he chose a wine course in Macon, Burgundy, finding himself in the same class as Jean-François Nick and Thierry Puzelat (this was in 1986/1988). The course were more centered on wine commerce but otherwise it was the same teaching than the Viti_Oeno of Beaune. He never followed the commerce side and discovered the production side of the trade. After he got his diploma, he worked in France and abroad for different wineries, in the Entre-Deux-Mers, Saint-Emilion, Saint-Joseph, Cornas, in California (Matanzas Creek,), in Chile. He liked his California experience, Matanzas Creek was a medium-size winery which was growing some of its grapes and buying the rest. There was lots of investments compared to many French wineries, a superb lab, two house enologists and so on. What he liked there is the fact that he could take part to all the tasks there, so that his experience was whole.
He also worked at times between 1994 and 1997 with Marcel Richaud in Cairanne (Rhone) and at La Tour du Bon (when Thierry Puzelat was also working there) and Chateau Pradeaux in Bandol. He understood that the type of wines that he wanted to do was the one without the additives tricks favored by business-minded wineries. Filling a glass from a cask Thierry Puzelat whom he met regularly like in La Tour du Bon in Bandol was already well into natural wine and he could meet different people sharing the same philosophy. He met for example Philippe Gramenon (before he passed away) of Domaine Gramenon, in Montbrison-sur-Lez, he liked his wines very much. Same for François Dutheil in Bandol whose wines were made on the same uninterventionist way. Through all these people he benefited from a long experience in the organic vineyard management and the non-formatted winemaking. When he looks at the way the farmers work and do things in general, including in Auvergne and including his own ancestors, he feels disappointed because there hasn't been much thinking about the products that they used extensively in their fields. He feels that there must be more concern and care for the soils and for the farm animals, something that the farmers in general don't take into account. With the company of these caring growers and winemakers of the natural-wine wave, he felt a shared connection with athenticity and a philosophy of work including life as a whole.

We reach his chai and cellar in the village of Jussat near Chanonat : it's a traditional winery farm building of Auvergne, a stone house with a large door. On the street level, there's the chai, a large room stacked with vats (including three 60-hectoliter cement vats) and a vintage Mabille pneumatic press. This Mabille is one of the first pneumatic presses of its time, and this is the same Mabille-press model that was used by Jules Chauvet, the famed enologist. Hervé Souhaut as well as Dard et Ribo use this type of press too. This is an artisanal facility with a soul, it's not very large but wine has been made here for ages probably, and the walls carry their load of yeast population. Checking a wine from a cask The vinification of the whites : the grapes are pressed in the Mabille press, then the juice is put to rest for a while. Thereafter, the juice goes down by gravity into the casks in the underground cellar. The casks are several-wine old so that they don't give woody notes to the wines. The wines are pumped back in the vats twice in general. He has regular pumps, not the ideal ones for this type of job, but he plans in the future to use an air pump because this way, there's no vibrations transmitted to the wine.
For the reds : grapes are put to ferment in the plastic or the cement vats, whole-clustered and without crushing or pumping over. The vat stage lasts one or two months, sometimes more. Then he blends the press juice with the free-run juice and proceeds to the élevage in casks or in vats. He doesn't use any additives including SO2. At the beginning he would add some sulphur on the whites in the press, and for the reds a bit at the malolactic fermentation. Since 2003, there's not even these minimal SO2 addings in his wines, they're totally additives-free, and of course, they're unfiltered and unfined. Asked about what allows this vinification without risking accidents, he says that the first imperative is to use healthy grapes. Now, he says, it's more risky to make whites with residual sugar. That's one of the reasons he uses only metal crown caps for all his wines, wether still reds, sparkling or sweet whites. He uses also only one type of glass bottle, it's a dark-glass Champagne-type bottle that can stand high pressure in case the wine gets lightly fizzy. The crown caps help protect his wines in different cellaring conditions, and they eliminate the cork-taint risk. Unearthing a dusted bottle from the cellar... The cellar is lined with casks, some 25 of them, and a there's small bottle cellar at the other end of the cool vaulted room, half-closed by a dilapidated wooden door. Pierre Beauger doesn't have many bottles there, he digs one bottle there to show it to me, that's a memorable wine of which he has only one bottle left :
__ Pierre Beauger Potion Magique (name of the cuvée) Chardonnay 2002. It was made from 5 pickings of pure botrytis on Chardonnay with 15,15° developped alcohol and 100 grams of residual sugar. He made 200 bottles like this one, with a 50-centiliter volume. He sold them for 25 € each and regrets that he has almost none of it now.

The casks in the cellar contain whites and reds, from different vintages, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Among these wines, there are 7 hectoliters of whites (3 casks made from 0,5 ha) which were harvested november 25th 2007 and this wine will be bottled at the end of summer.
About the cuvées, on favorable years where he harvests a normal volume of grapes, he makes about 10 different cuvées. This from 3 hectares of vineyards which are not yet all productive.
We taste a few wines :
__ Pierre Beauger Jussat 2008, from a cask. Chardonnay. There's a bit of oxydation, he says. Very light if any, I think. Notes of gingerbread. Nice wine. It's dry, he says, the malolactic fermentation is not made yet. He'll bottle this soon.
__ Pierre Beauger Jussat 2008, same wine but other cask. This is one of the 3 casks of the Chardonnay "Champignon Magique" 2008 (magic mushroom) cuvée. This cask doesn't have this light oxydative note, and he'll blend the three casks. The wine is lightly perly.
__ Pierre Beauger Chardonnay 2007. More a demi-sec (half-sweet) than a moelleux (sweet wine), it was harvested november 25th 2007 with a potential of 17,5°. Beautiful nose. That's a nice wine, with lots of complexity... The wine wasn't moved except for one racking. He tops up sometimes, rarely in fact, when he gets a bottle to pour there (he hasn't a separate container to top up his casks). He says that there has been some noble rot on some grapes, some passerillage plus some frozen grapes. There was no leaves on the vines when he picked on november 25. There's still residual sugar, the aromas have hints of exotic fruits, it's coming after some time i the glass. He will sell this wine 29 € a bottle (it'll be bottled this autumn probably).
__ Pierre Beauger Champeix (the terraces) Pinot Gris 2009. Harvested november 25 last year. 6-year old vines, planted in 2004. There was lots of noble rot too, he says, the harvest was beautiful. Lots of residual sugar still, but very beautiful, candy-like wine, with aromas of orange peel among others. This wine will stay there for the necessary time. A pleasure to sip, even if it's not yet near the completion of its élevage.
__ Pierre Beauger Gamay 2009, from a cask (grapes from a rented plot that we didn't see). Nice tannins. He doesn't make extractions and so the wine hasn't a harsh side. The tannins are there though, but they they're part of the whole. When he tells me the alcohol level here, I'm stunned : 15,6 ° ! that doesn't taste like this high, really. There's a light sugary feel at the end of the mouth, it seems, but he says that ther wine is dry. The cask isn't even full, the level is barely over half volume. This is the last cask of the press juice, he says, it will be blended with the rest later. To protect it, he puts some CO2 from time to time. It tastes so well that he considers making a small bottling of part of this press juice to see what it can yield as a separate wine.
__ Pierre Beauger Gamay 2009, another cask. This is the first cask that was filled. Some reduction, but not a problem, really. Dry wine already, it seems. Nice wine with character, with a hint of bitterness at the end.
__ Pierre Beauger Gamay Vitriol 2005. From a bottle. Made from a vineyard near the plateau of Gergovie, the color of the wine is dark because the vineyard has a few vines of teinturiers (dark-grape varieties). His life companion Fabienne is the author of the labels (see the Vitriol one on the right). There are a few words on the label, they were picked on an old alchemy text. Prune aromas, very beautiful wine. 13,5° nature, harvested in october, semi-carbonic maceration. This one exceptionally got a bit of sulphur, 1,5 grams at the blending before bottling. He sold that bottle for 13,5 € he says. This is easy to drink, fresh and all, nice wine indeed. Small black fruits side, liquorice maybe. These were whole clusters with ripe stems and this make people think they feel wood in there.

Pierre Beauger and his wife Fabienne have a 15-month old baby.
Pierre Beauger's wines are exported to Japan and to the United States (Savio Soares) and can be found in many cavistes and wine bars in Paris and across France.Pierre Beauger 3 rue des Templiers 63320 Montaigut-le-Blanc phone + 33 4 73 89 91 35 - call in advance & leave messagep [dot] beauger [at] orange [dot] frPierre Beauger's Gîte (rooms to rent) Caves in La Roche BlancheThis village of La Roche Blanche (means the white rock) is very close to Jussat. These Roche Blanche caves dug in the cliff overlooking the village are troglodytic houses and they were inhabited in the past centuries. See the pictures of the inside of the caves on the linked page, it's amazingly beautiful.

Comments

[Mike Sinor]

Once again a great read. Thank you.

[Kunavaina]

Great post, thank you. Can't wait to have a sip or two of those magical potions!

[Joshua E Patterson]

Hi! I am very interested in these wines and would like to contact your US importer!