Marie & Vincent Tricot (Auvergne, Loire)

Marie & Vincent Tricot Orcet, Auvergne (Loire)
This visit in the far flung eastern wing of the Loire Valley was one of the highlights of our recent winery visits. Marie & Vincent Tricot who manage their small winery with enthusiasm and seriousness at the same time epitomize this new generation of Auvergne vignerons who are bringing this corner of the Loire back in the forefront of the wine landscape. Again, one must take notice that Auvergne taken as a separate region (it's actually part of the Loire but it's so far on the east that few people know it) has the highest rate in France for vignerons making additive-free wines from organic grapes.
What brought Marie and Vincent in the region was a coincidence. They were living near Nimes in the Gard département in the south of France where Vincent was working in a winery, and they visited a family relative of Marie who lived there, near this beautiful village of Orcet (pic on left). As Vincent had heard about Auvergne also being a wine region, they jumped on the opportunity and looked around during these few days for any available wine estate. Through their relatives, they learnt that a small family estate was on sale, it had been up for sale for a few months with no takers in view. They met the owners and this first visit was the start of a new life.

The vineyard This was in 2002, Marie and Vincent's daughters were very young then and the previous owners liked to see this young family follow suit on the estate. the vineyard surface was about 4,5 hectares and since then, they replanted about 0,6 hectare. Vincent otherwise comes initially from the Anjou and Marie from the Beaujolais region, where her father runned a négoce. Before working in the winery in the Gard, Vincent had his training in the Wine School of Bel-Air in the Beaujolais were he got a BTS. Before going to the wine school, Vincent worked for different growers in Anjou, in Savennières and Coteaux du Layon, which let him time to travel in between. He did his training in alternance, a french word meaning that he was working part-time in a winery in the Beaujolais and following his degree at the wine school the rest of the time. Through the vignerons he worked with, he heard about a different way to make wine, a non-industrial approach, sort of. Patrick Cotton in particular, with whom he harvested in the Cotton family vineyards long before entering the wine school, tipped him in the very-early 1990s' about these wines that people called then vins sans soufre (sulfur-free wines). They visited together Marcel Lapierre in 1992 or 1995 as Patrick had been a trainee there, as well as with Jules Chauvet by the way. He remeber that they dropped after dinner like at 8pm maybe and they stayed until 11pm with Marcel and his wife Marie in the cellar, speaking of wine and tasting, Marcel Lapierre was like that, very generous of his time, even for young novices like them. Vineyards with mountain range in the far In their newly-found estate, they had everything they needed to work in the vineyard, a tractor, two caterpillars and all the tools,
but they had to change things in the vinification side, like put on the side the harvest pump (which is very violent on the grape clusters) and buy a conveyor belt to fill the vats, for example. They also bought cement vats because as they made carbonic macerations, they needed more containers. Also, they moved the vinification room from under the house (pic on top) to the barn which was more practical (pic below), especially after they put a cement floor there.
Even though the former owner had been farming organic for a very long time (by a precursor certification system named COMAC) and used wild yeasts for most of his wine, Vincent changed important winemaking procedures (he helped the former owner in the transition harvest in 2002, so he knows what was different). The wines were mostly sold locally, in bulk or in one-liter re-usable bottles for 3,2 € a liter, and Vincent & Marie kept on supplying these customers.
On their first vintage, 2003, they had 70 % of the vineyard surface stricken by hailstorms, a hard blow for their young business. So he decided to vinify the remaining grapes on carbonic maceration with several of the cuvées without any SO2 (les Marcottes particularly). 2003 was the heat-wave year in France with astronomic temperatures day and night, but in Auvergne they had some relative cooling in the night and apart from the hailstorm it was not that bad a vintage. The vat house They don't sell as much bulk wine as in the early years but they still keep some for people who buy at the winery. It's the same qualitative vinification, carbonic maceration with either no SO2 or very little of it. They never chaptalized and they always managed to make these wines at 11° or 11,5° minimum, a very honest table wine costing 35 € for a 10-liter bag-in-box. I ask Vincent if the cuvée I profiled recently (Wine News) was one of these table wines, he says no, it's a mid-range wine. In 2010, they hadn't a big-volume harvest, so they'll set aside only 10 hectoliter for bulk wine. Vincent Tricot in a young vineyard The varieties on the 4,5-hectare estate are Gamay d'Auvergne (the majority) whixch is a variant of Gamay with differently-shaped clusters, Pinot Noir (0,6 hectare in production) and Chardonnay (0,7 hectare), plus new plantings including Pinot Noir (which will make a total of 1 hectare when everything will be productive) and a few rows of Sauvignon. The Gamay d'Auvergne is known for having a higher acidity and larger, less-compact clusters, which is good to avoid rot. His vineyard is all planted with massal selections, and while we toured his rows, I even spotted some vines replanted through marcottage (pic on left), which is when you let a branch grow and put the tip in the ground so that it roots and grows from again from there (this was the cheap way to replant missing vines in the old time). His oldest vineyard, les Marcottes (the high-end cuvée) was planted in 1964 and otherwise his largest Gamay block which makes 2 hectares was planted in 1971 & 1972. The Sauvignon is not common in Auvergne, he planted some because he likes this variety, anyway, they bottle everything in Table Wine labels and he prefers it that way. He hopes he'll keep bottling this way even though the Côtes d'Auvergne just got the right to be labelled under their own AOP [as of last week, read this page in French]. The customers buy their wines without bothering of the lack of Appellation and that's fine for him. I think that when the wine buyer chooses a wine because he loves it and not because of a given Appellation agreement, he's doing the right thing, and when these "table wines" sell at the same price or higher than their conventional formatted wines, it proves that quality prevails over appearance. But it's always courageous from a vigneron to put all his wines under this generic labelling. Marie atop a cement maceration vat Maris is more on the commercial side of the winery but she also helps a lot during the harvest and in the vat room to empty the vats after the maceration. Here she stands atop a cement vat to check the carbonic maceration of a load of destemmed Pinot Noir.
Typically, the harvest which is manual and in boxes takes place with 15 pickers, they have been the same group of people for several years, coming from nearby Clermont-Ferrand and they do a good job. The Gamay is put in a vat for a carbonic maceration, usually whole-clustered with CO2 on the whole. They try to pick in the cool, like for example this year it was fine with only 13°C, and while in the vat waiting for the start of the fermentation, the outside temperature dropped almost to frost outside, bringing the vat to 9°C only, which is good. If necessary, if the weather is to warm during the harvest, he can use a milk tank to cool the juice (usually the whites that he harvests in the afternoon).
The carbonic maceration of the Gamay lasts between 10 days and 3 weeks depending of the cuvée or the vintage, with the goal being to avoid excessive extraction. Vincent checking a vat with Gamay This fiber vat is almost full with whole-clustered Gamay going through its carbonic maceration. You may spot a couple of white grapes among the Gamay, probably coming from a lone complanted white vine. Even the Gamay bulk goes through a carbonic maceration, it's just a shorter one like 10 days.
When he presses the grapes, he cools down the press juice before letting it finish its fermentation in a vat or in small foudres for the cuvée Marcottes (typically in two 12-hectoliter foudres). When the fermentation is over, he racks the wine and waits for the malolactic fermentation. Then, all the mid-range and upper-range cuvées are raised in wood, either foudres or barrels. To say it short, all their bottled wines have their élevage in old oak containers, the bulk having it in fiber or stainless-steel vats. Working in the cellar The fermentation starts on the wild yeast present on the grapes' skins, no lab yeasts added, and Vincent vinifies either without any SO2 from A to Z (like usually on the Marcottes) or with very little of it. Usually, he doesnt add any SO2 on the Gamay, and he adds sometimers on the Pinot Noir when the load contains some rotten grapes or some damaged by wasps. Even if he was always cautious from the start with SO2, he's been using less over the years. For example when he still used to add some SO2 on the white wine, last year was the firstvintage where he vinified and bottled his Chardonnay without any SO2. Before 2009 he used to add 2 grams once only, after the malolactic fermentation. In 2009, his main cuvées, les Marcottes, the Pinot Noir, the Chardonnay are totally SO2 free. And les Milans, a 4th cuvée, is mostly sulfur free if not for a part of this blend which had a bit of SO2. Some of the vats The cuvée les Trois Bonhommes, which is a Pinot Noir, is raised in barrels, it's more a Burgundy-style vinification : the grapes are destemmed, not 100 % but mostly, as he likes to leave a few whole-clustered boxes in the load. He likes to keep the load cold as is, and let it ferment quietly. Then there's some cap punching (especially from the mid-fermentation to the end) and a few pumping over. This year he decided to try a bit more extraction just to try, with 15 days of post-fermentation maceration along with 1 or 2 punching of the cap, but it still doesn't translate into excessive tannins, that's the way Pinot Noir is. If he had done that on Syrah where he worked in the south, that would have been probably very heavy on the wine.
Speaking about the Chardonnay, after the pressing, he decants the juice and have it wait the start of the fermentation in a vat, and when it has started, which can take some time when you rely only on indignenous yeasts, he puts it in casks. The élevage lasts from 10 to 12 months, depending of the organization of the cellar. Sometimes, he manages to fill the casks immediately after emptying the previous vintage, which allows not to use any sulfur wick in between. Marie with her daughters Manoë & Orane Here are the two daughters of Marie and Vincent, they're the artists behind the labels, and the older one, Orane, is already helping a lot in the winery when she has the opportunity, Marie says that it's very impressive...
We enjoyed a few of their wines sitting around the table in a room on the first floor :
__ Marie & Vincent Tricot Pinot Noir 2008, "les Trois Bonhommes", with a nice drawing made by the daughters representing thre bonhommes (guys). Vin de France (the new term for vin de table). Very nice mouth. Aged 10 to 12 months in old casks. Vincent says that this estate was organic since 1971, and the previous owner also used only wild yeasts for the fermentation (the guy was a passionate vineyard worker). A bit of SO2 in this particular wine, 20 mg.
__ Marie & Vincent Tricot Pinot Noir 2009. Table wine too. Bottled early august 2010. 3000 bottles of this. Nose : concentration. Zero SO2 here. He says that a bit of SO2 at the end of the malo can be good though. 13 ° alcohol in this vintage, otherwise less. Vines on clay/limestone.
__ Marie & Vincent Tricot Chardonnay 2010, from the cask. Striking aroma of pink grapefruit. Love the mouth. Vincent says that it's in the end of the ferm. No malolactic yet but they let it go if it starts. Tasting the Chardonnay from the cask __ Marie & Vincent Tricot Chardonnay 2009, snail _ if I remember, there's no real name because it's a table wine, there's just the sketch representing a snail, made by one of their daughters. They called it the snail because the wine was very long to finish its work... Nice round mouth with richness. Some alcohol (13 °). Whole-clustered Chard. No stirring of the lees for this wine, just pumping over.
__ Marie & Vincent Tricot Gamay "les Marcottes" 2009, the upper cuvée. Lovely mouth, very Pinot-Noir like actually. Spicy. The vines of this cuvée were planted in 1964. Sold out.

As we left, we walked to the organic market in the lower courtyard of their estate : Marie and Vincent Tricot have a weekly market of organic food (everything from meat to vegetables, charcuterie, cheese, homey and other things, including their own wines of course) on their own property, the producers living and producing their stuff in the region. It's a real friendly atmosphere and people seem to come and buy. I noticed that the prices were so much cheaper than the organic food you find in Paris.
We went to their wine stand after buying a few things to other stands and I discovered two other cuvées that we didn't taste : les Milans 2009, a wonderful Gamay that costs only 6 € and that I profiled recently (Wine News). The other wine was a natural sparkling, Jour de Fête, also with a nice drawing, a 2009. Makes only 8° or 9° in alcohol, and no SO2 at all. Costs 7 e only, real good value too.

25 % of Marie & Vincent Tricot wines are exported : to Japan (Cosmojun - Junko Arai), to Canada (Quebec, Bertrand Mesotten), Holland (Vleck), the United Kingdom (Club Vin Bio).
They sell 55 % of their wines directly at the estate, the 20 % remaining are sold to the cavistes and restaurants.

Marie and Vincent Tricot take part to several (mostly local) organic wine fairs : Sanaterra in the Beaujolais, Pollen in Sermentizon (Auvergne), Humus in Chateldon (Auvergne), les Dix Vins Cochons in Chateldon in Auvergne next december 2nd (it's in 10 days !!!) and also another natural-wine fair in Glaine Montaigut in Auvergne too.
This visit took place late october.

Marie et Vincent Tricot11 rue des Percèdes63670 Orcetphone + 33 4 73 77 70 67tricotvincent [at] hotmail [dot] com

Comments

[Rick Rainey]

As always, brilliant reporting. I would really like to try their wines, they sound magnificent. How is their English, as my French is fairly atrocious!

thanks again.
RR

[Bertrand]

Thanks, Rick;

I guess they speak English, they're young and you should make yourself understand.

[R Mather]

don't fail to visit if you can; Vincent speaks good English and the wines are fabulous