Les Jardins Esméraldins (Saumur, Loire)

Xavier & Muriel Caillard at home Brézé (Saumur, Loire)
Since I had the chance to taste the wines of Xavier Caillard at Septime early may, I wanted to visit his small wine farm Les Jardins Esméraldins near Saumur. His long-élevage whites were particularly pure and elegant, and the guy had this rare patience to let his wines take their time and pace in the cellar, I mean something like 6 years or more before bottling them and leaving them in bottles another year.
Xavier Caillard began to make wine in 1999, but oddly he released his first wines only in 2007, just because he waited patiently until the wines were ready. He bottles his wine as Vin de Table, in short, out of the Appellation system; but his wines are indeed the result of a very careful tending of the vineyard, the word meticulous being more accurate here, and of a very patient, additive free (including SO2) vinification, and here also, the word patient being taken at full load, as Xavier waited so many years until his wines reached their potentiality in the cool, dark cellar. The name of the estate, les Jardins Esméraldins or Emerald Gardens plays on the symbolic meaning of emerald as the color of hope and a stone needing delicate work. Additionally, there arealso a few words in Latin on the labels which means «It is time for us to awake».
Muriel and Xavier met in Bordeaux where he was studying vegetal biology (he has a degree with an option in Viticulture). They didn’t buy an existing estate but settled in Xavier’s grandparents house which was unoccupied and started to make wine from an already-planted vineyard, half being in Brézé and the rest further from here. 3 years ago he got an old parcel of Cabernet Franc (his oldest - 60 to 70 years) on which he left the grass grow. In Brézé like elsewhere, there’s been a shrinking of the replanted vineyard surface after the phyloxera, and farmers had sometimes to replant in land which was less «chlorosant» than the previous soils, a «chlorosant» soil being one where the vine doesn’t fix the iron and thus has trouble assimilate chlorophyl. This problem came from the fact that the American rootstock on which the post-phyloxera vines were grafted was more prone to this chlorose deficiency, so the soil had to be chosen more carefully. The history of post-phyloxera replantings seems to be very interesting here like elsewhere.

In the vineyard near Brézé We made a short drive to Xavier’s Cabernet Franc vineyard near Brézé. There are 50 ares here with vines aged about 60 years. As said above, he got this vineyard 3 years ago and as it was previously worked conventionally (with chemicals, weedkillers and fertilizers), he was careful in his veering toward organic farming, leaving greass grow between the rows but abstaining to plow in the beginning so as not to make it too harsh for the vines to adapt. Now that 3 years have passed, he may move the earth along the vines with a blade, in a first attempt to cut the surface roots and slow the weeds. There’s another, yet unplanted plot along this vineyard, but the area, while excellent for a vineyard, is prone to freeze in spring, so they’re still waiting to decide if they plant more surface here.
Xavier wants as much as possible to farm not only organicly like he already does, but without using machines. Right now he still uses a self-powered plow or a portable grass cutter but he plans to bring a draft horse here. He considers that a machine breaks the connection between the substance, the fabric, and the artisan, the craftsman, be it a baker or a grower. And beyond that almost-philosophical opinion, he notices that when you’re on a tractor, your attention is not really focused on the vine or the plant, and this is felt somehow by the living organism. And he adds that he is convinced that the harvested fruits, be it grapes or whatever you grow, are not the same if you work on this or that way, meaning organic is not enough. Here, Xavier and Muriel make all the vineyard work by themselves, but they say that it’s possible also to transmit this artisanal and thoughtful approach to a worker, a commis like they say around here, and for example Marc Angeli did exactly that with his aide Stéphane Bernaudeau, who now also begins to grow a small surface for himself, thus perpetuating a very rare type of vineyard management. As the viticulture schools don’t teach this way of thinking, the one-on-one transmission is very important. Explaining vine stories After just 3 years of organic farming, the diversity of the flora is already thriving, with vineyard garlic and all sorts of wild flowers. The contrast with what they remember the place looked like is striking, the soil was obviously dead with years of weedkillers sprayings, even if there was grass (a narrow grass stripe actually) every other row. This grass thing that many conventional growers now leave every other row has been suggested by the coop to have the vineyard management improve superficially, but it’s more marketing than reality for the soil life and the health of the vines. [You see this trend all over France actually, and if you look at the positive side of this timid imitation, it means that organic growers with their apparently-unkept vineyards are gaining attention and more respect from the until-then haunting conventional ones. If you’re on the pessimist mood, this is just a gimmick to fake a healthy vineyard with diversity when in fact they’re spraying just as much stuff__ and tricking their wines just the same in the cellar]. Muriel and Xavier say that it’s a step in the right direction because overall there’s less weedkillers on a given vineyard. The end of the plot Xaviers’s vineyard had this happy feel of a vineyard unhampered and unharmed by chemicals or mechanized tools. We should wander in the vineyard to help understand a given wine that we found out of the norm, it helps understand how great wines are made, all the way from the plant to the bottle. I was happy to spend time in this one, I learnt and felt a few important- if innocuous-looking- details, like for the trimming of the vines : Xavier is very carefull and he mostly leaves the shoots go up freely. If he cuts a few here and there, he’ll do it meticulously one by one by walking between the rows. In this season, you see often the vines kind of reaching for the sky, and most of the time, he just rolls this upper shoot gently around the wire, and if he cuts one, it will be by hand without damaging the leaves in the immediate vicinity. As we speak in the vineyard, we watch a tractor a hundred meters away trimming a vineyard in a hurry, it’s something Xavier would never do, it’s extremely violent on the plant with hundreds of leaves damaged, and when you see it by yourself with leaves blasted all around, you can’t but realize that it can’t be neutral on the vine, and inderectly on the grapes. Samely, Xavier considers the way each cluster is positionned as very important, and he will slightly reposition this or that cluster around the wire or the leaves, and also take away this or that leaf for a better ventilation. His approach is almost like bonsaï tending, and for that purpose he spends lots of time quietly looking at the vines, kneeling here and there to move or cut what he considers will help. He noticed by experience that when there were rotten grapes in a cluster at harvest it had often to do with poor ventilation (like too many leaves hampering the air from circulating) or clusters touching each other, and he corrects this problem months ahead the maturation of the grapes by casually arranging the leaves and the positionning of the clusters. Going down to the cellar Ideally, he says, it’s good to have on the North or Eastern side, grapes in full light with no leaves to cover them, and on the Southern exposition, clusters in the shadow of the foliage for protection, with still a good ventilation around. This tending of the vine needs to be done by hand, by watching the plant and arranging manually the foliage and position of the clusters, well before ripening has begun. Xavier Caillard says that he even begins this task at blossoming time. I watch him as he moves the grapes back in a more pertinent position here and there, sometimes because they’re stuck in an uncomfortable way between the wire and the branch, or he just separates several culsters which regrouped too close from each other. Stopping at another vine, he will take away a leaf here and a leaf there, to optimize the aeration while as much as possible keeping the foliage. The foliage also must be aerated, because leaves stuck together may be a source of disease, and as he farms organicly and tries to minimize sprayings, the best way is to anticipate and correct the problems before they happen. Plus it’s been recognized by research studies that when the grapes take the light since the earlier stage without too much heat and with good ventilation, it’s good for the color, antocyan and so on.

The underground chai and cellar of Les Jardins Esmeraldins lie right beneath the family property of Xavier and Muriel. You just walk across the garden and follow a few primitive steps going down to the door of a cave. Each step is actually an old slate post, as I leant during this visit that in the past, vineyard posts were made out of slate, of which the region had famous quarries and lasts longer than wood. As you can see on the picture on the side, Xavier still finds pieces of slate posts here and there in the vineyard.
Generations of winemakers have worked in these dark galleries and you find there several connected rooms, most of them several-centuries old. Xavier Caillard letting his wines age through particularly-long élevages, like 6 years or more, this is particularly interesting to experience this place. Long élevages weren’t something Xavier planned from the beginning, but along his philosophy of letting things unfold on their own rhythm, it just happened that he felt that the wines needed this cellaring time before reaching their best expression. In the cellar, Xavier Caillard continues this philosophy of manual artisanship. He works without tricks, sans artifice as he says, focusing on keeping the link with the substance (matière, just that here it’s not about the grape or the plant but about the fermenting juice and the wine. Time is important, again, because this is not about producing a standardized product with a standardized methodology, Xavier Caillard is into an artisanal work philosophy with a permanent adaptation to the situation, this is more like following and accompanying a living product than a foreceful formatting toward a square product. At one point, Xavier says that there’s a vibration thing in the food, and when it is produced in a violent and industrial way like for the industrial chicken or other meat, it has some consequences on the people who consume this meat. And it’s just the same for wine even if it’s visually less obvious than for chicken plants. Everything counts when you think about the vibration level, including the intentions ans state of mind of the person who tends the vine or watches the wine in the cellar. Xavier Caillard says that he works with all these parameters in mind, even if he precises that he doesn’t pretend that his wines are the result of this philosophy. For my part, having experienced the magic of his wines the other day at Septime, I now think that somehow something of this mysterious nature finds its way through the wine...
Incidently, the family cat followed us in the cellar whe walked in, and by the way it moved around it was clear that it had permanent entry rights in the premises and that the place was probably a fruitful hunting ground. It kept mewing while coming and going from under the casks as to show how good it was at policing the area.
The vatroom is actually set up in one of the cellar galeries, and it is almost surprising to see these stainless-steel vats sitting there in the dark. In this particular part of the cellar, you can see several types of vaults near each other. These stone vaults were designed centuries ago to secure the cellar ceiling and prevent a breakdown of the structure. Two are regular half-circle vaults and one is a diagonal-rib, gothic type of vault. That’s utmost interesting and impressing, finding such church features in the secular depths of a wine cellar... Casks with vats in the background The long élevage time wasn’t a deliberate choice from the start, he expected to wait some time but not that much, but the wines needed these long years in the cellar, particularly the vintage 1999, the first vintage, there was lots of tannins, lots of substance including bitterness sides in the wine which needed to evolve and mature. Actually the three first years were rather rainy and there was lots of sorting at the harvest, plus these were conversion years (from chemical to organic)for the vineyard which had to live overnight without its magic products, and all these factors didn’t contribute to make easy vintages. But the hard work already paid then : in 1999 he was the only estate in the Appellation to make Coteaux de Saumur win thanks to the rigorous sorting, when others just gave up because of excessive rot. In fact, Xavier and Muriel routinely make 3 or 4 pickings in the vineyard, harvesting the grapes when they consider them fit for the wines they want to make. Spending much time to check and tend the vineyard, they know well how they ripe and evolve. They notice also when grapes here and there shows signs of adequate ripening for a liquoreux, and they sort of put them aside mentally for a late harvest. I guess you need to know well your vineyard for this multiple-picking thing. Speaking of the harvest, they’re self-sufficient with two and a half do it : Xavier, his brother and Muriel part time, so it’s easier to get two people instantly on a given vineyard for partial pickings than it would be with a 15-worker team that they would have to pay and who could be busy elsewhere. They typically begin to harvest around mid-september and finish early november. 1760 vault When you walk into the cellar, one of the first things that you see is a pile of label-less bottles along the cave wall, these are 2001 wines which are through their bottle élevage. This Chenin wine was bottled in 2005 or 2006 and went through a slight refermentation on its lees, generating a few bubbles. Now it’s dry and tastes well, with a richness and aromas close from the ones of old Champagnes, like praline for This wine never got any SO2, Xavier bottled it with maybe a bit of residual sugar thinking that with the long élevage it wouldn’t start again, but the bottling awaked it, and also it somehow closed itself and needed many additional months to make peace with itself and feed on the lees inside each bottle to become the small wonder the wine is today. Not that the lees left in the bottle are so thick (se picture on the side) but this was enough to generate an exchange with the wine during the élevage in bottles and give birth to these walnut and almond aromas which weren’t there before bottling. The harvest maturity was a potential of 14-14,5 °, now in the bottle there is a comfortable 13° or a bit more, and the light perly side brings freshness in the whole balance of the wine. The buyers (it’s on the market now) don’t carafe it, it can be served like a Champagne, in flûte glasses, for apéritif.
The detail of a vault above shows the engraved date of 1760 but part of this cellar dates from the 1100s'. Awaking the wine for a second The red (Cabernet Franc) is stored in 228-liter barrels while the white (Chenin) goes into 400-liter ones (demi-muids), so as to bring less wood impact and less contact with the air.
__ We begin with tasting a 2009 white (Chenin) from one of those big barrels. We hadn’t tasted it at Septime, it’s still in the élevage stage and Xavier thinks that with the nice vintage of 2009 it will yield very beautiful wines. Beautiful nose. The wine is relatively translucid, there’s a bit of turbidity, of yeasts cloud when you look at your glass by transparency. He doesn’t stir the lees, because as the élevage is very long, if he stirred the lees there would be too much aromatic impact of the lees on the wine. The long élevage already provides a good exchange between the wine and the lees. No racking along these years. In the mouth, nice aromas of pear and soft-textured nougat. The barrels are old in general, they don’t keep stats but most date like from 1998, bought used from Marc Angeli when 2 years old (they take care to buy the casks from people who make true wines). He tries in general to fill a cask when they’ve just racked the previous one. Xavier says that this Chenin still has a bit of residual sugar and has gone into refermenting 2 weeks before even if it’s not detectable. The élevage will be probably shorter than for the early vintages (8 years...). In the mouth, there are notes of nougat, wheat maybe too. Very fresh wine.
Xavier tops the casks regularly, and in winter, he keeps the doors of the cellar tightly closed, the wine sort of takes its winter quarters also and everything seems on a hiatus. The cold temperature in the cellar even makes the wine retract and under vacuum, sort of, and he leaves it that way. In spring if he opens the bug he fills the void to compensate. The wine usually starts to live again and he lets it going. Having the fermentation last lonf brings complexity to the wine, especially that it’s at a low temperature. The yeast population is diverse and it helps for the diversity. With a fermentation that took months to unfold, you don’t get this alcohol-heat feel typical of wines having fermented on a short span. The alcohol is given a patina because of this outstretched fermentation : they routinely harvest with 14-14,5° and end up with (dry) wines making 12-12,5° in the bottle.
Now ! __ Two barrels further than the first that we tasted, Xavier syphoon wine to fill our glasses, this is a Chenin 2005 which has also taken its time. The opening of the bung makes the typical noise when there’s either a depression or a higher pressure, it is still obviously at work. The nose is more discreet here. The wine seems to me to be more on the mineral side, with notes on the resin range of aromas. This wine will be released next year, there are 3 barrels of it. Again, no stirring of the lees. The lees sedimenting without disturbance, the wine gets its contact and exchange with the thinnest lees which lie in the upper layer of the sediments. As for a few years he hasn’t made any racking in the middle of the élevage (thanks to the strict sorting of the grapes and to the quality of what gets into the chai), the wine really goes undisturbed during several consecutive years, the rackings and stirrings being usually the only upheaval episodes during this élevage stage.
Right now most of the wine is fermented and raised in casks but Xavier Caillard envisions to use other types of containers for bigger volumes, like cement vats, amphorae, or Nomblot vats, these sometimes-ovoid cement vats made with pure water and other organic elements. Cellar chat Xavier makes very long presses on whole-cluster grapes and thus gets very clear and limpid juices. The corps de la préssée, the main press load being particularly limpid, the juice goes directly into the cask, while both the beginning of the press or the one just after they reshaped the cake (of the pressed clusters) goes through a light débourbage or settling of the lees in a stainless-steel vat, before joining the other juices in the casks. He tends to use also the juice of the end of the press, it may me more amber in color and oxydized but it has more minerality and tannins. While it could be a disservice for a wine with a 6-month or one-year élevage, it is definitely a plus for a long-élevage wine, it brings lots of good thinks to the future wine. Along what I remember pacalet told me in Beaune, Xavier says that anyway the oxydized note of these end of presses goes away after a while, he vinified separately such a juice and whie the color settled on a nice gold, the oxydative aromas faded away. Tasting (and drinking) it after this chat, the wine shows a very classy structure, this is indeed an elegant wine. Xavier says that the 2009 has an acidic tension which defines the wine, but the structure still lags; the long élevage explain most of the difference between these wines, even if we’re speaking of different vintages and conditions. This 2005, thanks to the long élevage, shows a sharp minerality with sobriety, simply very nice. It may be very naive to say that but I feel the same beauty than when i look to these church-like vaults in the cellar, there’s something elegant, mineral and ageless here. Xavier says that he feels by the way a common ground between what these cathedral builders were looking for, and what winemaking can be. 2009 like 2005 was a nice vintage in terms of grape quality these years are among their first good vintages in terms of weather conditions, the 3 first years beeing quite difficult and arduous with lots of botrytis. 2003 was also a bit weird, it was the heat-wave year in France and it’s not easy to handle and adapt instantly the vineyard management when 40° C temperatures settle. They did it right with the reds in 2003 but the Chenin is still fermenting to this day (may be the wild yeasts which couldn’t cope) as there’s still residual sugar. Stone & Vine 1 These 3 pics shot in the Cabernet Franc vineyard show another facet of the simple beauty of this vineyard : Xavier picks up nice stones from time to time as he tills between the rows and he just lays them on the vine, and each time it's like they've found they perfect spot. I'm sure, like Xavier himself, that this simple attention and sheer poetry touches the plants like when they're immersed in Mozart music...

At this stage it’s the time for Simon’s afternoon nap and Muriel walks back to the surface with him. __ Xavier walks to a stainless-steel vat in the cellar and fills our glass with a brightly red and translucid wine, a 2010 rosé. When I see the vivid wine in the glasses it makes me think to Claude Courtois’ Nacarat, further North-East in the Loire. And you know what ? this Cabernet Franc has something in common with it, an appealing fruit verging on the grenadine candy, and a joyous feel when swallowed. This is Xavier’s first rosé ever, and he makes it from a plot planted with Gamay (some of it teinturier, dark Gamay) and Cab Franc, the Cab being direct-pressed and the Gamay going through a light skin contact in a vat during a night before pressing. For the Cabernet Franc he does a slow pressing which makes an equivalent of a short maceration. This all explains the color at the end. There’s still some fizzling with the fermentation going on with the residual sugar, and he’ll wait until the wine is dry. Xavier says that he opens from time to time the door of the cellar near this vat to activate the process. His idea with this wine is to work the rosé like a white wine, he’s not sure it has the potential in terms of structure but he’ll see that later. It will probably stay in the cellar for another year, if he releases it for spring, it’ll be next spring.

__ From a cask lying alone in a corner of the cellar : Cabernet Franc 2009, a wine with very nice aromas evoking wet stones and also ink. Made with the vineyard pictured further above. In the mouth there’s a good balance with the tannins and the fruit. There’s a maceration à l’ancienne with whole-clustered grapes in the vat but with only a partial foot stomping of the grape load. Stone & Vine 2 Duration of the maceration for this Cab Franc is variable, depending of the tasting of the juice. Second sip of the wine : very easily drinkable, I like that. The challenge, Xavier says, is to make something more than a simple wine with good drinkability, with some complexity and mystery. It’s up to the élevage now. Speaking of élevages, he considers that after the experimentations and vintages he’s been through since he started to make wine, he’ll favor durations of 3 years in the casks with an additional year at least in bottles (stored in the cool cellar), sometimes 2 or 3. He also discovered the value of the blending time in the vat : it’s interesting to keep the wine a long-enough time in the vat after blending several casks, because he felt that the wine was finding its own balance during that pivotal stage, it reaches another dimension. They bottle the wine by gravity with a 6-spout filler, without using a pump. And to rack the casks into the blending vat, he uses a hand pump like the ones that were used in the 19th century (forgot to go see it and take a pic, like we were supposed to). It’s a piston pump with two chambers and each movement sends a liter in the vat. Again, he favors this type of tool to keep the link intact between himself and the wine.
in the future, there will be more chronology in the releases of their wines. In the beginning, they first released the 1999 (some 8 years after the harvest), then the 2002, the 2001 then the 2000...
__ From a bottle : a white 2000 (Chenin), bottled february 2011. Very nice nose with ripe aromas, very classy wine in the mouth. Muriel likes it too, she says it has a feel between the Chenin of 1999 and the 2002, it has both maturity and verticality. The interesting thing is that this bottle was opened a couple of days ago and it still just tastes so well (he just put back the cork). Stone & Vine 3 The wines of Xavier and Muriel are shipped to wine bars, restaurants and cavistes throughout France, like for example a nice wine bar in Colmar named L’indécence or Vinéa, Le Temps des Vendanges and Le Tire-Bouchon in Toulouse. They didn’t add new venues in Paris recently except for Le Septime in Paris (and they’re sold at le Baratin for 3 years already).

Les Jardins Esméraldins 17 rue Amiral Maillé 49260 Brézé phone + 33 2 41 51 66 67 x.caillard [dot] wanadoo [dot] fr

Comments

[Terroirist CY]

So true, it's always the case. Grapes & therefor wine needs time & pations, there's no hurry when working with vineyards, grapes, wine. I've never tried this house but I'll look for it, it seems from what you've written that Xavier's wines are something that we should all seek more, rather than the conventional, oaky, fruity, tannic "bombs" that they give 90s+ in the spectator, Parker's Advocate & the likes.

Thanks