Les Maisons Brûlées, Touraine (Loire)

Paul & Corinne Gillet Pouillé, Touraine (Loire)
The well-known domaine des Maisons Brûlées which is located on the southern bank of the Cher river near Saint-Aignan has changed hands, Michel & Béatrice Augé having sold the wine farm to retire nearby. Michel Augé has been doing a great job for years in his wine farm, gathering around him growers who wanted to learn the biodynamic way and organizing special sessions in the farm where all would make the preparations together. The domaine is almost contiguous to Clos Roche Blanche and Noella Morantin on the slope overlooking the Cher river. The lieu-dit name (maisons brûlées means burnt houses) comes from a group of houses that was destroyed by a fire long time ago in the vicinity.

Paul Gillet worked a year or two with Michel Augé to know the domaine and the vineyards, and he now lives in the wine farm along with his wife Corinne and their 3 children. Michel Augé's 12-year-old Praline (the white horse on the right) is still enjoying the farm for now, and by the way this mare had a foal with Olivier Cousin's horse Romeo last year, it was born in june 2013 and it now lives since last april at Olivier Cousin's wine farm in Anjou. Praline is now recovering from her post-foaling effort and nursing. Michel used her mostly to collect the boxes of grapes at harvest, but this farm has always had a wide range of farm animals, making it a real living farm in the sense meant by Rudolf-Steiner. These animals stand along a lightly-sloped vineyard next to the wine farm, it is a very peaceful setting.

Paul and Corinne Gillet were originally cavistes in Alsace (Mulhouse), then they lived abroad a few years, managing a restaurant in Argentina between 2007 and 2011, where they looked for a winery, but this was not so easy to start something there, so they came back in France. Paul followed a wine school in France, then he was a trainee at Bruno Schueller whom he already knew at the time he had a wine shop (he used to sell his wines). Paul & Corinne search for a wine farm led them to this corner of Touraine, where the environment and living conditions were fitting with what they were looking for.

Gamay vines We had a walk through several of the vineyars near the farm, with Ilitch (the young dog) running around. This large 2,2-hectare single-block parcel just down the slope from the wine farm is also named "les Maisons Brûlées", it looks very alive and quiet, it is bordered on three sides by woods and with the biodynamic farming and insect/plant diversity the place breathes happiness, we'd loved to see all vineyards this embedded in the natural environment. They collect lamb's lettuce between the rows in winter, it's so good Paul says, crunchy and tasty.
They are going to do the debudding here the following week, they've plowed but the grass comes back fast, they make another pass. The large square parcel has several varieties, first a few rows of gamay (the oldest gamay of the domaine, planted in 1955), then pineau d'aunis, then cabernet franc, then some other types of gamay and a few rows (15 ares) of ungrafted sauvignon (franc de pied) which seems to fare well at the age of 8 now, he says.

They regularly get some foliage and later some fruit eaten by wild animals, namely roe deers, and the only precaution they use is plastic barrier tape used at construction sites, it's not the ultimate protection but they bark at fencing the whole parcel. Down the slope at the left end of the parcel near an apple tree, Paul kneels down near a vine and shows me the crime scene : you can distinctly see the neat cutting of the (probably appealing) young leaves and shoots. This seems a small annoyance but in the end it results in a lot of fruit. the suspect don't go far into the parcel, he says, they prey usually just on the first two rows so that they return safely and quickly to the cover of the woods. Paul says that the woods also takes some sun away for the border rows but the natural environment and the insect diversity is largely worth the drawbacks.

At some point as we were walking to the next block of vineyards, we passed a small group of baby vine of pinot noirs, like a patch of miniature nursery along the grass road, it is a try with planting cuttings directly into the ground and see what it turns like. Paul says that hes doesn't know if hell plant these vines as franc de pied or do the grafting themseves. It's mostly a small-scale experiment.

Custom-modified blades on an ageless straddle tractor Christophe Foucher had told me about the particular type of plowing invented by Micher Augé in order to plow on a softer manner. The idea here is to just disturb the weeds in theit rooting but without overturning the horizon (the upper soil) completely, saving thus the insect and worm life that take a blow when you expose the undersoil completely with a normal plowing. They use a tool with two disks under the row for that purpose, and as they couldn't find such a tool in the farm-tools dealers, Michel Augé had the system custom-welded on his old Jeulin tractor. This straddle tractor (enjambeur) is a poem by itself, it is among the first of this type (must be from 1970 or before), it has such a wide span that it can straddle over two rows, and also in spite of its size, it's very thin, light and easy to fix (don't expect much computerization here). It seems to me the nightmare for dealers because once you have one like that you never change, it runs for ever....

You can see on this video the two disks that will do the job of cutting the weeds at the root level, and move sligtly the clods so that the weeds feeding is hampered. Another nice thing with this tractor is that the driver cas see what he is doing, because there's a large hole in the upper frame/chassis with direct view on the ground.

Les Maisons Brûlées has lots of parcels of different varieties (9 varieties), sometimes grouped heterogeneously in a single block, and given the different maturity pace of these varieties they use a group of 18 pickers in tandem with Bruno Allion's wine farm so that between the vineyard of Bruno and the ones of les Maisons Brûlées, the pickers can be busy for a longer time. They organize the picking so that both wine farms gets the team on time when a given parcel is ready, it's good both for the two growers and for the team who will be sure to have work and not be told to stay home every other day.

At one point we walked along a row where wild Absinthe (the plant, pictured on right) was growing, protected from the plowing by being near a post or a vine. This is the plant that was used to make the namesake spirit. Absinthe was very popular in the 19th century but was banned in the early 20th century on the pretext that it turned people crazy. In fact it may have been banned to ease the economic difficulties of the wine producers, the clue being that the campaign against Absinthe (conveniently under the slogan "All for Wine, against Absinthe" erupted in 1907, the year the winegrowers rioted in the south.
There's been a revival of Absinthe production since a few years.

Herdeleau Pinot Noir (1960) Having walked to the Herdeleau parcel, we see the pinot noir plus some menu pineau and some côt (blended with the cab franc to make Erèbe) and some old sauvignon (the ones Michel vinified in Poussière de Lune). The old pinot noir here traditionally went into the cuvée Herdeleau but he vinified it apart because he loves pinot noir and wanted to see it separate. On the whole on the domaine they have 68 ares of pinot noir.
Pointing to the sauvignon rows there (pictured on right), he says that these vines are exceptional, the yields are very low but the quality ogf the juices is largely worth that. In 2013 for example which was a tricky year for the maturity everywhere in the region, they could pick grapes at 13 ° on these old Herdeleau rows, as well for these 60-year-old sauvignon as for the old pinot noir nearby. He says that you have to look hard to find a grower who could pick grapes at 13 last year, and these old vineyards are exceptional in this regard.
Paul decided to blend this old sauvignon with the menu pineau for the cuvée Poussière de Lune for a change, and keep the cuvée name. These sauvignon vines are the only ones that are trained "à poussier" on the domaine while the rest of the vineyard is trained "à baguette".

The soil is very healthy and with a soft grain, it's not compacted and runs naturally from your palm of your hand. The messy look of this ground, with these clods of earth still bearing their grass cover, can't dismiss a fundamental truth : the soil is alive and for the vines that grow on it, nothing else counts.
Here in this area the roe deers have made less damage to the crops, Paul says, some côt was damaged but much less than the first block of vineyard we walked through, maybe the 3 sides of woods make them feel more comfortable...

The square press The chai is actually an outbuilding sitting a few meters of the house, on the way to the vineyard block with woods on 3 sides. The thick-wall building made of cut-stone blocks is not large, but there is room for the press and a surface cask cellar, which is relatively cool compared to the outside temperature. The press of of a rare kind in the region, it is a 10 or 15-year-old Coquard, a Champagne type of press, with a large square or rectangular basket. Michel Augé bought this press when he decided to make his own wine and stop selling his grapes to the local coop, this was in the early 2000s'. This type of press allows slow pressings and its advantage also, because of the vertical pressing, is that there's less crushing and damaging of the skins and must (compared to the cylindric horizontal presses), which is good for the juice. The other positive thing is that with this vertical pressing you have a natural filter or drain, the pomace or "cake", which is doing the job of a big filter and retains a large part of the thick lees that would otherwise flow into the juice.

The pressure begins very softly with this press, at 50 bar only, and it reaches 200 bar maximum, which is the starting pressure usually for the standard horizontal presses. The press time is very long, this year his sauvignons took 15 hours, it was a bit extreme but in general it takes a longer time, especially that it is not automatic and that you have to overlook it manually.
The drawback is that you need a minimum volume of grapes because the basket is quite big. Paul says that he found a second hand verical press with a smaller volume, he'll put it back in order and will use it for the small batches of grapes when needed. It's a beaune type of press with an ingenious system with pulleys to increase the pressing weight. There's a command panel on the wall (pic on right) to handle the pressure in the basket.

For the débourbage (settling of the lees), there's an underground cement vat so that it uses only gravity. Then, they pump upstairs into a vat so that for the following stage (entonnage or filling of the casks for example) they'll also do it by gravity. Until now all the bottlings were made by gravity with a 6-spout filling tool.
They use the cement vats (pictured on left) for the reds, they can bring the grapes from above (there's an access up there), they just have to open the lid on the top, and at the end they devat the pomace through the small metal doors in the bottom of the cement vats, using a conveyor belt to bring them outside.

A dynamizer for the biodynamie On our way to the cellar outbuilding we pass along a couple of dynamizers, take out the tarpaulin for a picture. These odd containers are at the center of the mysterious process of the biodynamic farming, they're used for certain "preparations" at crucial period of the year, named 500 and 501, sometimes they're just water with silica, and you have to stir the water one way (and maybe after that, the other way, I don't remember). You can use such a machine to do the stirring or do it by hand like here at AmByth, but as strange as it looks when you hear about it for the first time, it works, it really makes a big difference in the vineyard and ultimately in the wines, and I know some growers who don't follow at all the esoteric cosmology of Rudolf Steiner but apply nonetheless meticulously these preparations and spraying techniques because they witnessed the living proof of their efficiency.

Here Michel Augé used to do preparation sessions together with other growers of the region who come here for the occasion (Paul will keep doing that), for example Pascal Potaire, Noëlla Morantin, Laurent Saillard and Joel Courtault. They use both this device and learn to do it also by hand in a bucket, it is sometimes useful for a small surface.

They prepared for example a 500 [preparation] last autumn, before that he had made a silica preparation with Michel Augé, and they just made another 500 a couple of weeks ago. They'll do a silica preparation again soon, this time with the fellow winegrowers. The 500 is more intended for the soil and earth while the silica spraying is for the foliage, the plant. You can use it for your vegetable garden too or to help the environment around your beehive.

The device on the picture is made by a small company named Eco-Dyn, this company is based in Anjou and seems to make also special plows and tractor-pulled spraying machine specially designed for biodynamic preparations.

Cellar room with different vessels At Les Maisons Brûlées there are two cellars, first a two-room cellar in this outbuilding near the chai and the house, and another deep cave a few kilometers away where Michel Augé traditionally does the élevage of its reds. As 2013 had low yields, Paul can use this outbuilding only if he wants, he just put the cuvée Erèbe there, but he'll use the deep and colder former quarry too in the future. B. and I had visited this other cellar a few years a go when we made a first visit here (this story, last pictures).

There are different sizes of vessels in this outbuilding/cellar, normal casks, demi-muids (500-liter barrels), and a couple of foudres. Michel Augé had already bought a new Grenier wooden foudre 2 or 3 years ago, and Paul bought a foudre from Alsace in 2013 just before the harvest. When he was working in alsace for example with Bruno Schueller he was used to the Alsace type of foudre and he wanted one for here.

The Alsace foudre makes 14 hectoliters while the Burgundy Grenier makes 15 hectoliters. The main difference between the two models is that the one from Alsace is very traditional with everything in wood while the Grenier has several stainless-steel fixtures like the door and the double tap. This cooperage, formerly known as the Tonnellerie Baumert, this cooperage was in cessation of activity for a year and then refloated by a former employee (Alain Jenny) who now runs it under the name of Tonnellerie Jenny. Like Grenier, this cooper also remodels and repairs disused foudres to put them back in use.

We first taste a wine from a small fiber vat on the side, which Paul uses for the topping up :
__ Les Maisons Brûlées Cuvée Silène, 100 % Sauvignon. The rest of the wine is in the casks and foudre. Tastes well, this wine worked continuously through winter without stopping (the temperature was mild this winter). Of course in the fiber-glass vat it goes faster than in other containers, Pau says, and it's now finished while in the other vessels it's still behind. It should be almost finished now, he hasn't made checks to see if the was still a bit of sugar.

Tasting from the barrel now Paul now walks to a barrel in the cellar room in order to taste this same cuvée, but with a different expression.
__ Les Maisons Brûlées Cuvée Silène, Sauvignon. From an old barrel, age unknown, Paul says that Michel who has been using it for many years may know when he got it. There is obviously still some sugar to eat for the yeast, in this wine, as said above, the pace of the wine is slower in wood barrels than in a fiber-glass vat. there may be 15 grams et here.
__ Les Maisons Brûlées Cuvée Silène, Sauvignon, this time from the new foudre, the one from Alsace. In order not to have too much lees in the glass, he took the wine from the opening on the top, plunging the winethief to syphoon the wine (unlike the Grenier vat, there's no tap on the front anyway). This is the first wine vinified by this foudre. the wine is turbid, with a vivid yellow color, like a bernache (fermenting juice just after the pressing). The advantage of such an oval-shaped foudre is that it keeps the lees in suspension, which facilitates the exchange between the lees and the wine. It looks to me that there is less remaining sugar here, but this may be because of the light bitterness of the lees which hide the sugar when you taste. One thing interesting to note is that there's no wood imprint here in spite of the fact it's a new foudre, the larger volume is why, and it makes a difference from the first use.
This wine will be blended with the other containers of Silène, this should be just before the harvest, and when racked, it will wait another 2 months at least before bottling, and more if he feels appropriate. Poussière de Lune - Grenier foudre Paul says that he likes to work with foudres and that if he could put a 20-hectoliter foudres in here, he'd love to add one because it is very soft on the wine in terms of wood imprint.

__Then Paul fills a glass of Poussière de Lune 2013, from the Grenier vat, using the small tap, cleverly positionned at mid-level so that you may get a bit of floating lees (if the wine is still active), but not too much. I didn't ask but I think that this white is a blend of sauvignon and chenin.
This wine, contrary to Silène, stopped fermenting for some reason in mid-december. He says he might be starting again now but he's not sure, he hopes so. This is a superb quality of juice, he says, the grapes were at 13° potential with a beautiful acidity, it should yield a very beautiful wine. You feel indeed the acidity behind the remaining sugar.

The Maisons Brûlées only makes wines under the Vin de France label (table wine), I don't remember the reason at the origin for Michel Augé but obviously in order to stay loyal to his authentic winemaking and not compromise to please the conventional tastes of the appellation commission.
The cuvées are the following : 2 whites (Silène & Poussière de Lune), plus 4 natural sparklings (Maisons Bullés Blanc, Maisons Bullées Rosé, Ucello/chardonnay and Altérité/cab-sauvignon rosé) 4 reds (Dernier Né, Herdeleau, Erèbe and the Pinot Noir).

A red : Herdelau __ We first tast some Herdeleau from the small fiber-glass vat used to top up the vessels. Blend of Pinot Noir, Gamay, Pineau D'Aunis. There may be just a small proportion of Pineau d'Aunis but it was enough to leave its aromatic imprint on the wine. Very fresh, onctuous wine, very enjoyable. Asked if he plans to filter, he says no, he'll keep the wine as such, racking it before and letting it settle quietly.
__ Herdeleau 2013 again, but from a normal cask (picture above, shortened "R2LO" on the front). On the nose, the wine is more on the lactic side because the malolactic is stil underway. in the mouth it's still a bit fizzy. This wine is more mature, with a small bitterness at the end of the mouth
__ Herdeleau 2013 again, from a tonne, a vessel also known under the name of demi-muids, actually a 500-liter barrel. Very nice wine, with a particular freshness, tastes very well. Paul says that the spicy end is also very interesting. The vessels will be blended anyway and in my mind they all taste well, the blend should be nice and the different wines complement each other.

__ Pinot Noir 2013, old vines of pinot noir, he vinified 600 liters on the side to see what it makes, putting the rest of the old vines into the Herdeleau blend. He wanted to test the old vines by themselves. That tastes very good, with morello cherry notes, and acidulous-candy notes. Clear color but an exciting and vivid red. There's no name yet for this cuvée, Michel Augé used to blend the whole with Herdeleau. He could technically tell it's pinot noir on the label even on Vin de France (table wine) but it's such an adminitrative nightmare to get the authorization that they'll not ask for it. But the customers don't need it to be printed to know it's pinot noir. All these laws are made for the industry, the mass bottlers, Paul says, they're not adapted to quality wine-farms working on small volumes.

Natural spakling "Maisons Bullées" __ Paul pours me a glass of red wine that he took from a fiber-glass vat, this is the base wine for a cuvée I'll have later through a bottle after leaving the cellar, this cuvée is named Dernier Né.
Very turbid. Asked is there is some pneau d'aunis in there, he says yes. The wine is very fresh and enjoyable with its fruity expression. It's made with several bottoms of vats and vessels, the part with the thick lees, he put all that together, it's mostly gamay with pineau d'aunis, he can't tell the exact proportion. You need to taste that to understand how positive the lees are on a wine, there's an energy in here, you feel like you eating as well as drinling, on the positive sense of the word, this is full of healthy things in here. Very nice and easy to drink. Paul is happy that I like this wine too, and he firmly considers that the lees are behind this energy, the seduction of this wine.
__ Maisons Bullées white, Vin de France 2013, natural sparkling from sauvignon. Once bottled, these sparkling go sur lattes (lying) on the other cellar, the deep former quarry under the hill a few kilometers away.
The bottle with a yellow label. The wine is turbid and white (the glasses above are both filled with the other pet'nat). The mouth is well balanced on this natural sparkling, and I like the type of bubbles, scarve and thin, they don't blow up your palate. The deep cold cellars are good for that, Paul says. Also, he isn't looking for high pressure and they bottle with relatively low-densities (residual sugar) so that the pressure after the following fermentation will not be too high.
__ Maisons Bullées Rosé, Vin de France 2013, made from gamay. 5-day Maceration in small boxed piled in a cement vat with CO2 all over, and after that, pressing. almost red, with an exciting color, almost red with milky shades. He keeps a batch of non-disgorged bottles, that is with the lees still in the bottle. He brought the two types at a wine fair in Alsace recently and people loved the non-disgorged version, the one with the lees. several cabvistes ans restaurants ordered some, so he may augment the volume of the non-disgorged natural sparkling. Again, he says this has to do with the energy of the lees. Costs 11 € tax included at the wine farm. Very enjoyable wine indeed velvety and fresh. And it wine makes only 10,5 % to 10,7 % in alcohol.... Dernier Né 2013 (Gamay/Pineau D'Aunis) Asked about the use of SO2, until now he hasn't used any in these wines and will try not to. He had just to had some sulfites in 3 barrels earlier, and these barrels will be split. Of course he doesn't use any sulfur on the incoming grapes at harvest and, except for accidents like a barrel turning weird, he'll not use any, and for the bottling, he'll do case per case, it just depends the way he feels the wine.

__ Back in the house, we sit on the terrace and Paul brings a bottle of Dernié Né (Vin de France 2013), Corinne arrives at this time and we all enjoy the wine in the shade. This is initially a red for the spring, it is 50/50 Gamay-Pineau D'Aunis, Paul managed to keep the balance between the two varieties, he even retained a cask of gamay because otherwise the gamay would had overcome (he'll blend this gamay with something later). this is the first time this cuvée is made at Les Maisons Brûlées, and as Derniè Né means new born, he chose to use the compulsory warning sign featuring a pregnant woman, just that he enlarged it full label size. I hope the wine police will not subversive irony here...
The nose is appealing, immediately, and the mouth doesn't lie to the nose, very fruity and chewy, with the spicy character of the pineau d'aunis. Unfiltered and unfined of course.
There are two demi-muids of this wine, or 9 hectoliters, 1200 bottles, not a big cuvée. Costs 9 € tax included.

40 % to 50 % of the wines are exported, to Japan (Oeno-connexion), the United States (Louis Dressner), Belgium (Fruits de la Passion/Vincent Damien & Troca Vins Naturels/ Jacques Masy), Denmark (schun), United Kingdom (Gergovie Wines/Harry Lester).

Les Maisons Brûlées 5 Impasse de la Vallée du Loing 41100 Pouillé paologillet [at] yahoo [dot] com [dot] ar + 33 6 58 30 97 90