Clos Cristal (Saumur, Loire)

Eric Dubois, winemaker at Clos Cristal Champigny, Loire
Clos Cristal is an interesting estate for many reasons. First, the winery and its vineyards is exploited by-, and is the property of- the Hospital of Saumur, the Centre Hospitalier de Saumur, in short, a public health facility. Its 2 permanent employees, including the winemaker Eric Dubois, are thus on the payroll of the Hospital, which is not an ordinary situation. The net earnings resulting from this winemaking activity are of course used for the benefit of the Hospital. Saumur is only 8 kilometers from Champigny near where the estate sits, and as you may have guessed, these two localities gave their names to the Saumur-Champigny Appellation. Whatever, the question that may arise is : How could such a strange thing happen, a public Hospital owning and operating a winery ? The hospital, which was long time ago known under the name of Hospices de Saumur or also Hopital Général received these vineyards with the chai and cellar beneath them as a donation in 1928 by a very original individual named Antoine Cristal. Born in 1837 (1837-1931), this man made a fortune selling cloth along the roads and being curious of everything and having a high entrepreneurial spirit, he climbed the economic ladder and met many important people and artists. At the age of 50, deciding to make a new career in wine, he bought the Chateau de Parnay (in 1890) a few kilometers from here along the Loire which had a planted vineyard of white grapes. He then planted a separate vineyard of Cabernet Franc near Champigny, in a move to push forward the reds of the region (at a time when the region was almost only known for its whites). He spent lots of time in the vineyards and in the cellar, and while not born or raised as a vigneron, this became his passion and he put all his creative energy there. This was around when the phyloxera struck the French vineyards and he was among the first to get the American rootstocks to plant and graft vines on, he even created a vine-grafting school and he was also the first in the area to set up trellis wires for the vines, when until then the vines would grow as goblets around which you could walk. To add to this entrepreneur portrait, Antoine was fighting for an ethic of natural wine [already then...]. According to his contemporary and friend Alfred Benon who drew this sketch on the left (Antoine Cristal is 91 then), he not only fought the chaptalization which was commonly practiced to make wine, but he envisioned a coming era when chemists would do whatever they'd want with wine and replace the real thing with junk. Can you imagine that, where did he get such strange ideas ?!?...

The vineyards and walls Antoine Cristal took his new venture seriously, investing a lot of money in new plantings and having workers build a huge wall around his vineyard to make it a Clos, a walled vineyard. There are 3 kilometers of walls in and around this 10 hectare block, and even for a rich man like he was, this was an investment, especially for someone who joined the winemaking adventure at an advanced age. And this paid off, as Antoine Cristal's wines sold as far as the highest ranks of the English aristocracy and to the best Paris restaurants. At a time when wines didn't travel that much in France and were mostly sold locally, he helped put what was not yet known as the Saumur-Champigny wines on the map. As soon as 1891, his wines got awards and medals in Saumur and in Paris. I even read that his white liquoreux beat Chateau Yquem in a blind tasting at the Foire Agricole de Paris in 1905. Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister during WW1, was a fan of his wines and made personnal visits to Antoine Cristal. The parallel walls But Antoine Cristal was really not an ordinary vigneron, and making easy money was not his goal, he wanted to make the best wine he could with what the sun and the soil could offer. And he was ready to innovate and try new things, pouring in the money for that purpose. He had the idea to optimize the ripening process by building lines of parallel walls inside the Clos. Maybe he had heard or seen by himself the amazing walls of Thomery near the Chateau of Fontainebleau, where 350 kilometers of parallel walls were built for a better ripening of table grapes [look at the satellite view on these incredible parrallel walls in Thomery]. But he went further than that and with his typical imaginative entrepreneurship, he decided to innovate to help keep the roots in a fresh atmosphere : around the year 1900, he built special walls with holes all along at mid height so that the roots would stay cool on the North side and the foliage and grapes would enjoy the sun and the positive thermal inertia of the other side of the wall. Building the walls took him 6 years with 12 workers, quite a challenge...Here was a man who didn't think narrowly in terms or quick returns like an accountant : the best quality was his goal, and he was ready to invest whatever it took for that goal, even if the sales wouldn't cover his huge investments. This smart-if-costly move helped reach the optimal maturity of the grapes 3 to 4 weeks earlier than normal on a very natural way. Let's remind that the Loire' latitude didn't translate into a hot climate, especially at that time when climate change was not a front page issue. Vines trained through walls Here are the incredible Cabernet Franc vines of Clos Cristal, going through their 60-centimeter-thick wall to bath in the sun on the other side. You think you can't be surprised by vineyards anymore after having seen so many of them, and then this comes to you. I had never heard of such a plantation mode and strolling around these walls was an awakening experience. Antoine Cristal was to realize later that the vines rooting deep anyway, they don't necessarily need this North-side planting, and so he planted another, additional row on the South side of the wall, which in the end increased the competition and was good for the wine. Whatever we might think of the rationality of this experience, the wine benefits from the vine-growing on the walls, there is this inertia property of the walls in the ripening process that you don't find on the plots using regular trellising.
Thinking to this whole story again, the fact that a hospital keeps this beautiful winery running (and we'haven't spoken of the wines yet !), is somewhat puzzling when you think to the French hygienist lobby reigning unchallenged and busy fighting our age-old wine culture on our own money. Let's remind for example that the heavily-subsidzed anti-alcohol group ANPAA with its 1266-strong staff [sic - it went up to 1375 since] and an annual budget of more than 74 millions € [sic again] fueled by the taxpayer has been doing everything it could to instill guilt to French wine lovers and inflict heavy fines (through the complicity of complacent judges) to companies or even newspapers it suspected of promoting wine. As a result, there's almost no advertising in France for wines and all the French-based newspapers and media think twice before writing or airing a wine-centered report that could be viewed as incitement to drink by this morality police body. France counts many such associations which work against the common good in spite of their budget being entirely funded by the taxpayer. Good news could be coming soon from an unexpected direction, with the Greek clouds possibly echoing into the French mega-debt and overweight public sector issue. This could push whoever runs France to review spendings, and there could be hopefully an overnight drying up of such badly-employed public money. The French have begun bashing Moody's and other rating agencies very recently (after years of praising them for awarding AAA grades to the French debt), which could be the sign they know something is coming this way... View at mid-slope The general appearance of the vineyard made you guess right : the vineyard is farmed organicly since about 15 years, and officially certified since 2001. There's both some light plowing between the rows and grass being let grow freely. Wandering through the vineyard, I even felt that there was a sense of freedom and ease in the way the foliage grew, here was a happy vineyard. The organic farming would have been undoubtly approved by Antoine Cristal who wanted to make wine using exclusively grapes planted on a good soil, and sun. They just use coppe and sulphur sprayings when needed on a minimum level, and this year as the weather conditions are particularly fair and dry, they used less than one kilogram of products per hectare.
The soil, as you may see on the picture on left, is particularly sandy at the surface, with the tuffeau (sandstone) table at various depth beneath the sand. Because of the sandy nature of the soil, the vines take longer to root down compared to vineyards elsewhere. Walking on this soil, you really feel like walking on the dry part of a beach, with the ground slipping away under your feet, very funny.
As said, most of the vineyards here are Cabernet Franc, but there's a bit of Cabernet Sauvignon on the walls too, and there's this new plot of Pinot Noir and Pineau d'Aunis planted this year. Otherwise the vineyard is 45 years old on average, with the oldest rows being 80. Apart from the vineyards here, they have another 0,5 hectare of Chenin near the Hospital of Saumur proper. The Comtois horses Recently, they've begun working now and then with two draft horses from the Comtois breed. They've been working with a CUMA (a group of farmers putting their efforts or tools together) on that subject because there's a growing interest to bring draft horses back in the vineyard (there may be some marketing too]. The lovely two horses (pic with Eric Dubois bringing hay) are just on the other side of the road in a prairie without remaining grass (it has virtually not rained for months). They're not using them yet to plow, it takes time to train them for the job, but they used them in the last harvest to draw the cart with fully loaded boxes. The harvest is manual of course and the horse-drawn sledge is much softer on the soil compared with the tractor, so they may try to make all the harvest with the horses. Speaking of the harvest, last year it lasted 10 days with a team of 18 pickers. A wholy-underground facility Another amazing thing is the underground facility, not just the cask cellar but the vatroom and the chai with the press, everything is sitting deep under the vineyards level, making you think to Jacky Blot's Domaine de la Butte. These cave walls are probably thick with billions of yeasts waiting for the next harvest.
Antoine Cristal in his time also innovated in the chai : realizing that hygiene was very important to make good wine, he lined the inside of his vats with Bohemian glass tiles. Of course today the vats and tools have been modernized but the place remains impressive. Actually, I'm told that this chai used to be open with the sky above, but after heaps of rocks collapsed into the chai they decided to cover it with cement, giving it this cave feel.
At Clos Cristal, in addition to the organic farming, the wines are vinified naturally, no additives are used and almost without SO2 either, which is another level of challenge. Eric Dubois the winemaker is the son of vignerons, but he didn't intend to follow this career initially. He studied architecture and by the circumstances of life he veered back to winemaking, ending up teaching at the viticulture school of Montreuil Bellay. Eric Dubois favors non intervention for his winemaking, and apart from a small sulphur adding on harvest day, he doesn't add SO2 further on, including for bottling (particularly for the vintage 2010, not a single cuvée got SO2 at bottling). He took this path gradually, realizing that an increasing number of people develop an allergy to sulphur, and also because he tasted wines here and there with little or no SO2 and spoke to the vignerons, exchanging tips about their respective experiences. The old press with the decantation vat After walking up the ramp of the chai back to the surface, we took the stairs leading to the cellars underneath the vineyards. This is a very beautiful place, and I would say, almost untouched, with for example the place where the vignerons of the 19th century used to press their grapes. You can see on the picture above the vertical rectangular-shaped hollow carved into the stone to hold the press lever. This was designed for an ancient type of press commonly named pressoir casse cou or casse coué in French (I'd translate that as "break-your-neck press") because such a press could break your neck if unproperly manned : there was no screw system or secure way to block the lever like in the vertical presses that came later, and the heavy lever (the size of a tree) could bounce back up violently and kill the worker instantly. You can see that the ground was purposedly tilted so that the juice could flow to the decanting vat (carved into the rock too) on the lower left. Even though the press is not there anymore, these remains of ancient winemaking are very beautiful. There were a few such presses in this cellar, and they would bring the grapes down these stairs, who knows how, and do all the pressing and cask filling there. There was no bottling of course then, the wine would reach the consumers in casks. About these ancient presses, see this interesting page about old types of Press in pre-industrial France (click on the pictures for more details). There's a "Casse Coué" press on the lower part of the page (Fig. No 43), click on the picture to enlarge it. Cuvée Boutifolle We taste the wines in the cellar :
__ Clos Cristal, Hospices de Saumur, Clos Tiremouche. Sparkling rosé (table wine). No vintage on the label, but it is a 2010. This is the result of a simultaneous harvest of Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc & Chenin, pressed together, the color comes thus freely (it's a pale rose color here), then it ferments in vats, and it is bottled when there's 20 to 25 grams of sugar left. That's it, no sugar added, it ferments on the wild yeasts on its own sugar. Very aromatic sparkling with very light bubbles. Grenadine notes, among others. A pleasure to drink. No dosage, no residual sugar, and no SO2 added (including on harvest day). Eric Dubois prefers this method compared to the traditionnelle (the Champenoise), the wine is made faster without extended élevage sur lattes (bottles lying to settle the sediments), although it did stayed 9 months "on lattes". 2000 bottles made of this only. Costs 9,5 € at the winery. I haven't a pic of the bottle but it is a nice regular sparkling bottle with its cork and muselet.
__ Clos Cristal, Hospices de Saumur, Chenin 2010 (the 45-are plot near the Hospital of Saumur). Depending of the vintage and because they make only 3000 bottles on average, they don't follow a particular style of Chenin year after year. They make sometimes liquoreux, or sparkling, or a veil wine with this Chenin. This one is a simple fresh Chenin, he says, to keep the fruit. Fermentation in vats on the indigenous yeasts like all the wines here, bottled mid may without SO2, after a light earth filtration. 10 €.
__ Clos Cristal, Hospices de Saumur, Saumur-Champigny, Récolte 2010. The main cuvée, Cabernet Franc. Needs a bit of aeration at this stage, although less than some time ago, Eric Dubois says. Here, apart from a bit of sulphur when the harvest arrived at the chai, there has been no other addition including for bottling. The fermentation takes place with destemmed grapes, with a maceration varying in time, from 14 to less than 30 days. What is sure is that there's no pumping over, just a bit of juice is poured manually on the cap to humidify it. He says that a regular pumping over brings the risk to liberate too much tannin into the wine. They also don't rack the wine much. Filtered on earth. They could avoid any filtration if they had a few more months of élevage, but as it's bottled relatively early (last may), they prefer to do one, even if a light one (there may be some sediments after that). Nice fruity wine already, with a light sucrosity, and I feel that it will offer its best after a couple of years. Costs 8,5 €.
__ Clos Cristal, Hospices de Saumur, Saumur-Champigny, Boutifolle 2008 (Boutifollle is the cadastral name of the plot inside the Clos). Cabernet Franc. This is Cabernet Franc from the Clos (without the ones growing along walls, which are vinified separately), and for this cuvée, after a fermentation in stainless-steel vats, there has been a 2-year élevage in 600-liter demi-muids (where the malo took place also). The nose is quite different, with intense notes of eucalyptus leaves for example. The tannins stand out for this vintage, but Marc who pours the wine says that a long decantation helps. 14 €
__ I couldn't taste the emblematic cuvée Les Murs, the one made with the Cabenet Franc grown along (and across) the walls at it is still fermenting now, but I'll try to taste it one day. Les Murs costs 15 €. Let's remind that this wine tastes very different, and when harvested, a large proportion of the grapes are passerillées or dessicated, which gives it a solar character (according to the winery's price sheet). Eric Dubois says that there's more concentration, with striking prune notes and higher alcohol, but the acidity is high too because the concentration occured very early. This wine is dry, all the sugar is transformed. They make 3000 bottles of Les Murs.
Pic on right : Looking up to the sky from the cellar through an aeration chimney. The feet in the cool, the head in the sun...

Exports : U.S. : Bourgeois Wines, Vias Wines, Canada (Quebec) Vinealis, U.K. : Caves De Pyrene, Holland : Pieksman Wijnimport, Belgium. For exports to other countries : Genuine Wines.
Links :
Alfred Benon's book about Antoine Cristal ,Cristal, vigneron saumurois.
Donations to the Saumur Hospital across the centuries (article in French)
Research paper on the History of the Clos (walled plots) in France and in the Saumur region (in French)
Wine Doctor page on Clos Cristal

Clos Cristal 49400 Champigny phone + 33 2 41 52 96 08 fax + 33 2 41 52 97 81 contact [at] clos-cristal [dot] com www.clos-cristal.com Satellite view of the Clos and the winery

Comments

[Michael]

Excellent Piece as usual! These wines are in the USA at the moment and with Savio Soares Selections.