Helda Rabaut (Chinon, Loire)

Helda Rabaut at her cellar door Cravant-les-Coteaux (Chinon, Loire)
When I first met Helda while visiting Bernard Baudry earlier this year, my first impression was that she was someone with a project. She was presented to me as a worker at Baudry but my intuition was telling me she wasn't only a part-time worker in a winery, and as we exchanged words I learnt that she was setting up her own winery near the village of Cravant-les-Coteaux (picture on left), working with selected purchases from the Chinon area. She's been making wine under her name since a year and from what I tasted she could be around for the long term. Her story reminds me the one of Julie Balagny in the Beaujolais; like Julie, Helda is originally from Paris and she is also showing lots of energy in her approach.

Helda Rabaut didn't take the shortest way to the life of winemaker, she was initially studying law in Paris and in parallel, in order to make some money and do something, she worked by chance in a wine bar near where she lived, le Baron Rouge. She began to appreciate wine there, because otherwines there wasn't a particular wine culture in her family. Two wines were a revelation for her in these years, a Saint-Aubin by Domaine Bachelet that her uncle poured her, and a Pommard Premier Cru. She doesnt remember the estate for this one, she had guests at home and just took randomly a bottle in her father's cellar and that was also such a great pick...
She worked 3 years at Le Baron Rouge until 2005 and she decided to drop the law school then. The only thing she knew then was that she wanted to work in this field, even though she admits that she didn't know anything about winemaking. As a first step, she thought that learning how to make wine would help her work in the commercial side of the trade or something like that, it was unclear at the time.
Picture on right : the town of Chinon and the Loire river

The chai and cellar near Cravant Switching career abruptly, Helda called wine schools in mid-august. The good thing for her is that she had graduated from high school with a Baccalauréat S with a scientific-oriented cursus, and it was a good start to get admitted in a wine school. She chose the wine school of Tours for no reason in particular, just that it wasn't too far from Paris, but she stayed for better reasons.

With the wine school she also had trainings now and then in different places, like in Provence in a research center working with the INRA : the Centre de Recherche et d'Expérimentation sur le Vin Rosé, which is the only research body in the world entirely focused on rosé. It was very interesting for her, she began to understand the complexity of the issues, including the technical ones.

She also spent time at Domaine Cauhapé, which was very interesting for the economy side of the trade.

Then her really formative training (but she says that she didn't realize it fully then) was at Domaine de la Grange Tiphaine. She says that the uncompromising commitment for quality with which Damien works at La grange Tiphaine had a lasting impact on her, and she understood that later. She also had a 6-month training at the Bourgueil Coop. There, she learnt about the sales to to supermarket sector, something she's not close to do now but with which she learnt the strict normative regulations enforced by this retail sector onto wineries. Helda Rabaut on the press After her studies during which she hadn't had real contact with grapes, her first job was at Nicolas Grobois in the Chinon area (not far from Cravant), and she loved working with him because she tried her hands on everything, in the vineyard, the cellar, doing lab tests, blendings, everything, she felt she was trusted at every step. She was also working part time at another winery, Domaine de l'R (Frédéric Sigonneau).One day in 2011 (it was a wednesday and it was raining, she remembers) Nicolas asked her if she wanted to make wine for herself, for a try. He told her he knew where she could buy grapes and he offered the use of his winery tools and containers to vinify at his place. She accepted and this was her first wine. Asked about the style of vinification she followed, if it was the one of Nicolas, she says that she had actually learned from Frédéric and Nicolas and for her first wine she used these two experiences together (and she doesn't say that not to offend anyone, she states with a smile). Frédéric works more on the infusion style with the freshness side, not in overmaturity while Nicolas is rather the other way around. Nicolas worked in the New World and received other influences there. Both winemakers work with organic grapes. Helda Rabaut on a tractor She found a chai to rent near Cravant (pictured all along this story) complete with cement vats, an open barn (perfect for the pressing stage) and enough room for her estimated production in the near future and even beyond. She just had to insulate here and there and she close with wall a part of the barn to make more room because her facility right now is crazmped with bottle pallets.
Knowing that Helda routinely drives a tractor at Bernard Baudry, I asked her to pose for a second on this onesitting idle in the courtyard facing her chai. Visualizing all her new skills, I am amazed by her versatility and expertise, this is a long way from the law school... She began to work for the Baudrys when she looked for more empoyment time in winter, and they offered her to work for them, as they knew here through the Domaine de l'R (Frédéric Sigonneau and Mathieu baudry are childhood friends). Her first job there was tying the stem wood on Clos Guillot, not bad in your resumé...
So, her first vintage took place at Nicolas Grobois in 2011, and she made 2 cuvées (reds) then, and in 2012 there will be only one cuvée made, because the vintage was quite tricky and she prefered to blend the two wines. Posing in front of a cement vat from 1963 We walked inside the facility and I understand why she wants to add a room by closing one third of the open barn with a wall. The room is now cramped because of a couple of pallets, bottles waiting for the delivery truck. There a 2 or 3 more cement vats in there, and she uses them. They're very convenient because she can work inside if necessary. The one here is was built in 1963 by a company named Amboise Pressoirs. She cleaned the vats beforehand and she is happy to work with this type of container.

__ Helda Rabaud Chinon Telle Quelle 2011, tastes very well, very open. Ripe nose with aromas of dark generous cherries, clafoutis. Bottled march 20 2012, a bit early because of economic reasons, so she filtered a bit (on earth) and lightly SO2-added at the end of the malo and at bottling. Now she thinks that she could have avoided the SO2 on malo but she learns. At bottling there was probably 22 of free SO2 left. In the future she hopes to release the wines later and not need to filter. Costs 4,5 € without tax and 7,5 € tax included for private buyers. She made 3600 bottles for this cuvée in all, plus 1200 bottles for the 2nd cuvée (Tangente).bottles
The wine is made from grapes purchased to Patrick Lambert (Pascal's brother). 2 parcels involved (25 " 45 years), both with a gravel and sand soil, in the plain. This vineyard has the same conditions and latitude than Les Grézeaux of Bernard Baudry, for those who are familiar with Baudry terroirs.
Like said above, this first vintage reflect the dual influence of Frédéric and Nicolas. Frédéric makes very light infusions, macerations on the light side, just one light pumping over per day, no crushing, pushing lightly the cap only. She had a 3- or 4-week maceration here. This wine was vinified in fiber vat at Nicolas but the 2012 is vinified and raised in a non-tiled cement vat like the one above.
She buys the grapes sur pied meaning that the grower (wo is farming organic and plows the soil) sells her the grapes still on the vine, ready for picking. It allows her to concentrate on the important picking stage, where sorting is sometimes vital. In the small vat room __ Helda Rabaut Chinon Telle Quelle 2012. In 2012, the two cuvées are blended in a single one. On the nose, there are dust notes which I like. She says it's more open than when she last tasted it in Paris. I like more the substance in this wine. Helda says that for this 2nd vintage she changed a bit her vinification, knowing better where she wanted to go. the two wines were vinified separately in two cement vats before being blended, first because a single vat couldn't hold it all, and also because she wanted to see how they tasted separately. One of the vats was obviously more on the fruit, round and supple and she devatted it before the end of the fermentation because she like the way it was at this stage, easy and pleasant. The other vat (from the clayish stripe in the 45-year-old vineyard) which had a more interesting substance was left longer in the vat. For the devatting, she asked her boyfriend to join and he helped her. She's obliged to get inside the vat, it's too deep and she has to be careful with the SO2. She brings a lighter with her and checks the flame, pausing from time to time. Tastes good, easy drink. She says that the whole thing is more on the fruit, maybe less on its terroir than in 2011.
Up to today, she makes wines from a total surface of 1,25 hectare, in two blocks. This wine makes 11,7 ° in alcohol, but it's fine, and she didn't chaptalize. She adds that there's something people begin to know, it's that the phenolic maturity and the alcholic maturity don't happen together, and it's not because the alcohol level is lower than aromas are not ripe.
She made 4800 bottles of this single 2012 cuvée. She didn't make a single cuvée because of smaller volumes but because of a substance she considered sub-standard. Tasting in the cask cellar She is poised to get more vineyard surface soon : this year, she'll work for the vinifications at Domaine de l'R until mid december, then from mid december to end of march she'll work at Vincent Girard, a vigneron who also manages a nursery, and this grower sell the grapes from 13 hectares from his total surface of 15, and he's organic. So Helda will buy him some grapes too. And the rest of the year she'll work at Bernard Baudry, so you get the full circle. She did also some intensive plantings of vines when she worked for the nursery, 70 000 so far this year (with her co-workers) and this is very sporty, always kneeled end bent, you need a health discipline, she says otherwise you can't cope. This nurseryman/grower has very nice grapes on his 15 hectares (farmed organic) and she will buy him the fruits of a very nice slope. Since she's done some pruning for him last winter she had time to gauge the parcels and a few of them tempted her; now she knows that demanding wineries are also vying for his best grapes so she hopes to get a nice slice of his fruits. Having already grapes from gravel and sand on flat terrain, she told him she was looking for clay on slope, and she just needs something like 70 ares more, or 3000 bottles. So if everything turns right, Helda should make wine from about 2 hectares at the end of the year. The vines are 70 years old, that's another nice side of the deal and the soil is clay/flintstone. The cabernet franc there will be ideal for nice-structured, long élevage wines. She doesn't plan in the near future to buy vineyards but if she warms to the idea in the next few years there should be many good opportunities because lots of growers/vignerons retire.
Not having to work directly on the vineyards from which she makes her wine, she is more light hearted on this issue (she pays the grapes by the weight) and can concentrate on the winemaking of her service jobs for others. Tasting from a cask Asked about the weather situation so far in 2013, helda says that around Chinon on this side of the Vienne river they had 140 mm of rain in may, or twice the norm, there was some frost around april 27 (Cour-Cheverny and bourgueil were hit harder) then there has been this hailstorm [edit] in june, the only thing is that the growth is late. and there begins to be some filage, when the flower aborts and twists (see pictures below).
__ Chinon Tangente 2011 (magnum bottle), made from vines sitting on a small clayish stripe in the 45-year-old parcel, these grapes being vinified separately. 8-week maceration. One year élevage in cask. Helda opened this magnum because the 75cl bottles are sold out. she was largely influenced by Nicolas Grobois when she made this wine (she vinified it at his facility) and she made a long maceration : 4 weeks fermentation plus 4 weeks on its pomace. She didn't want to put it in cask because in her mind wood must be used carefully but she had no place to put the wine, so she went to Bernard Baudry for some used casks and put her wine in there (the casks were 5 or 6 wines old). She also got a tonne (demi muids) from Nicolas. I feel more structure here i,ndeed, the soil makes indeed a difference. She sold 1200 bottles in 4 days to professionals during a trip in Paris, so she was wondering if her professional prices weren't a bit too low... She sold it at 6 € without tax to professional and 10 € tax included to indivuidual buyers.
We walked to the cask cellar a few steps down, it's a half-basement cellar, cool like a real cellar. She says that it made her sick to bottle and sell all her wines so she had decided to keep 2 casks full of Telle Quelle 2012, just to enjoy the feel to have wine in her cellar, and she offers to taste it. She'll bottle it later and will name it Telle Quelle +, to differentiate it. She will bottle it by hand like Tangente, using a 6-spout bottle filler lended by Bernard Baudry, it works by itself by gravity, and this wine will not be filtered. She will also use a small machine from the Baudrys to cork the bottles.
My own pic of the label been blurred, I borowed this one from Amicalement Vin. In the open chai Helda fills our glasses with wine taked from the cask and we walk out for a warmer temperature.
__ Helda Rabaut Chinon "Telle Quelle +" 2012, from a cask. The wine is cold and needs to be warmed up in the glass. Seems less open now, compared to the one in bottle. We taste the 2nd cask. I like this 2nd cask better, it is straight forward, the tannins are more melted away in the end of the mouth. After a few minutes, with only a drop of the 2nd-cask wine in the bottom of the glass, I smell great aromas, very beautiful aromatic impression...
There are still a few (full) casks in the cellar belonging to the former vintner renting this place, some of these casks come from Chateau Sociando-Mallet, quite a reference. The guy wo worked here, Frédéric Hardouin, alas stopped his winemaking business. I remember having bought one of his wines at le Vin au Vert in Paris. I hope he will bounce back somewhere.
She explains how she vinifies also at Domaine de l'R, where's she's trusted to take things in her own hands. At Domaine Bernard Baudry, she is entrusted with the mission to take grape samples in the parcels for sugar, acidity and Ph levels. It's important that samples are taken along the same procedure and by the same person because it gives a regularity in the analysis year after year, making the data more reliable. She also knows where their many parcels (nearly 40 of them) are located, which is very important for this type of job.
We speak about the pressoir in the background, lended to her by Frédéric, it is an old 24-hectoliter Vaslin. She says that it's a very convenient and simple press. At first she was skeptical about it, all this wood and so on, but it makes a very good job. There's an inbuilt program but she (and Frédéric) never uses it, they just taste continuouisly the juice with a glass and stop pressing when she feels the juice turns less interesting. They just have to clean it thoroughly everyday when in use. She found another press for her so she'll not need this o,ne anymore, it's a smaller, 12-hectoliter press of the same type, exactly the volume she needs. It's even in a better shape than this one, and second-hand, it costs nothing. A normal rachis We walked briefly outside on the next vineyard to see how this problem looked like. First, Helda showed me this future cluster, consider that the whole thing covering the picture is the future cluster, and what she points to is what is called in french the rachis, it is the main flower of the inflorescence, it is located the base of the stem and it will carry normally 20 % of the grape load in the cluster. This one is normal, you see the tiny future flowers/fruits. At this season, especially if is rainy and cold, the grower will check directly this part of the future clusters. Failed rachis turned tendril Here is the problem encountered in the spring growth when faced with difficult wrather : the filage of the rachis, which fails to produce nascent flowers and fruits. This cluster disorder makes the normally fruit-carrying rachis turn into a tendril, which turns in less fruit at the end. This is the sort of small detail for an unsuspecting observer but for the grower it means a drop in grape load that normally can't be caught up later. La Varenne parcel We then drive to one of the 2 parcels she's making wine from, this is La Varenne, a parcel with a sandy soil, almost like on a beach. The grower has gotten it plowed recently, and we can feel indeed the sandy nature of the earth by taking a handful of it. In spite of the flat nature of the parcel, it's very draining when it rains and the grapes don't fill with water, the down side is that when it's dry it is really dry underneath for the vines, they suffer quite a bit.

This visit took place june 8 so in between the foliage have grown of course. As said above, she is doing also some plowings, and she learned to drive and manoeuver a tractor this year at Bernard Baudry, the nice thing being that they have different types of tractors, some being simple, older models like the one above, which are sometimes more fit that big modern tractors depending of the parcel.

Speaking about Esca which kills lots of vines here too, Helda shows me when we drove along La Croix Boissée (a parcel of Chenin belonging to Bernard Baudry) the ovegrafting she's been doing herself intensively for them. Overgrafting consists in cutting the dying vine under the ground level and grafting new wood over it. It is a new technique to counter the Esca disease which seems promising so far, and she's personnaly overgrafted many rootstocks for the Baudrys. This is also faster that just uprooting the vine and replanting. All the yellow-plastic protected baby vines we see here and there are actually overgrafts and Helda took away one of these plastic protections to show me the graft underground. The wood used for these overgrafts is wood from the year which has been taken from the healthy Chenin of the Baudrys and kept in a cool cellar. These wood stems have just been refreshed in water before the overgrafting. This technique has been intensified in Sancerre where the toll for the sauvignon is dramatic, and the technician (François Dal) wo trained them for 2 days to do these overgrafts came from Sancerre. They've overgrafted 250 rootstocks just in this parcel.
Read this article (in French) about the overgrafting technique against Esca. The Battreaux parcel We drive further to her second parcel, Battreaux, which is similar to Baudry's Les Grézeaux and has a soil thick with gravel and sand. It's been plowed too and the vines seem older. The woods are very close and usually she doesn't get many grapes from the 5 first rows along the woods. This parcel makes 80 ares (79 to be precise) while the other one makes 40. She loves this parcel and even if she just buys the grapes she hopes to do it for the years to come.

Helda Rabaut sells her wine to good cavistes of the region like la Cave Voltaire (Chinon), Enfin du Vin (Candes Saint Martin), Café de la Promenade (Bourgueil), 1001 Vins (Tours), Ô Lieu Dit Vin (Tours). In Paris her wines can be found at La Cave de Tolbiac, at le Siffleur de Ballon, at la Fine Gueule, at la Cave d'Ivry, at Fine L'Epicerie and at Au Nouveau Nez.
Helda Baraut took part to Vertivinies in Nantes, a wine tasting event where visitors could buy wine too and which was devoted in its last issue to young wineries (younger than 5 years). Next year she may take part in Pierre & Catherine Breton's event in Bourgueil, Fête de la Nature. She worked there this year, but just to help Frédéric of the Domaine de l'R manage his stand. She says it's indeed a nice wine event.

Helda Rabaut La Hardonnière 37500 Cravant-les-Coteaux helda [dot] rabaut [at] gmail [dot] com phone +33 6 73 53 58 45

A living witness of a bygone era While riding my motorcycle back to the Cher valley further east that weekend, I passed what is indeed an extremely rare surviving vineyard still planted with fruit trees. In the early 20th century or even later, many if not most vineyards were planted with fruit trees scattered all over, this was before the mechanization of the vineyard work. That's a dream of a complantation and the result of an empirical way of doing things, nothing scientific here. This smal parcel survived with this configuration probably just because it has always been a private parcel belonging to a farmer who kept the vines for his personnal wine consumption and hadn't efficiency and productivity in mind. Some of the fruit trees I passed seem to be indigenous varieties of possibly pear trees, possibly of the type to make spirits.
This vineyard is located along the road east of the village of Bossée.
Satellite view of this small complanted parcel.