Mito Inoue, Auvergne (Loire)

Mito Inoue on her terraced Pinot Blanc Champeix, Auvergne (Loire - pink patch on bottom-right of the map)
I had heard for a while and on a few occasions that a young Japanese woman was making wine in the remote slopes of Auvergne on a very small surface, it's been whispered to me here and there, beginning with wine people met in Japan, and I couldn't resist tempting a visit and meet this winemaker. The weather was great when I visited and the terraced vineyard offered their nice side under the sun, I guess winter is more austere if very beautiful in its own way, but not an easy season on a motorbike. Here is another hard-working artisan winegrower who does her part to revive the age-old wine culture in this region (remind that Auvergne was the 3rd French wine region in terms of volume in the 19th century).

I met Mito in Champeix where she has her small cellar (she lives in Montaigut 3 km away) and if I was wondering before this day why she had come such a long way from Japan to settle in the region of Auvergne, I had aleady a better understanding when in the place : the region has these well-preserved villages and landscapes and she just felt like in a new home here. Plus of course, Auvergne has quite a few motivated artisan winemakers working the most traditional way and often without any sulfites, and there's a buzzing rebel scene among the remaining vineyards.

Let's start with the beginning : Mito first came to Paris in 2003 to learn French, and while there she came across many wine fairs as Paris is overwhelmed with wine salons (fairs) and dégustations (tastings), most of them almost free. That's how she began to make her wine education because when in Japan she didn't like wine much because of the headache when she had some. Later she'd understand that the excess of sulfites was why these headaches and she began to know better how wine was made. Once as she was beginning to be curious about the winemaking, she asked (this was 2004) to a vintner she had met about doing a training at his place, he was from Bergerac, but once there for her training during the harvest this was a shocking awakening : the winegrower was adding all kinds of additives during the winemaking process, she couldn't believe it and she wondered if this was what wine was about.

At the cellar door Back in Paris she was not yet discouraged and she was sure wine was not always made this way, so she tried another job in the trade, she went to the Caves Taillevent, a respectable wine shop in Paris, to be a trainee there, she stayed 2 months there and tasted lots of nice wines. She says she doesn't know what type of wines they stock right now but at the time (around 2004/2005) there were quite a few natural wines like Olivier Cousin for example and she liked these wines, here were wines that were definitely different and probably not made like in the winery where she stayed in Bergerac. At about that time she had to go back to Japan because her French visa was expiring and it happened that Taillevent had set up a restaurant in Tokyo, so she went there to work as a trainee-sommelier. But the wines served there weren't very interesting compared with Taillevent-Paris, this was mostly Bordeaux and Burgundy wines and mainstream values because the public there was very conventional and she quit after some time.

So she was tired of that and wanted to come back in France, which she did in 2007 with a working holiday visa, working a few months in Paris in restaurants and Valence. When in Paris she had met Pierre Beauger of Auvergne, she had discovered his wines back in 2005 (Champignon Magique, Potion Magique, she loved the wines) and since then she wanted to work with him and learn. She had a training there in 2008, after which she flew back to Japan and then took an other working visa in 2009 (Compétences et Talents) with which she could stay 3 years in a row, she then returned to work with Pierre in Auvergne. She went to work this time with lots of prime artisan vintners : Gilles Azzoni, Michel Augé, Christian Binner, Anne-Marie Lavaysse, Alain Castex, Clos Fantine, Axel Prüfer and others in Ardèche.

After all this experience and learning she thought it would be good for her to start make wine by herself, and for that she thought Auvergne would be the place of choice, so she came back here in 2011 ti vinify her first vintage. Of course it was arduous to find available parcels, as you may know, vineyards are scarce in this region where conventionally-farmed wheat and other crops now dominate. See this picture of Mito with Pierre (center) shot a month ago, I found it on this page featuring a gathering of rebel winemakers named Petites Rencontres autour des Vins Vivants.

A gem of a cellar When you walk down the very worn steps of the cellar hinting at a continuous use for generations, you understand tha magic of working in such a place. You're in the middle of a relitavely-big village and it seems that people down there had their own wine cellar in town where they probably made wine from their own parcels just outside town. It's beautifully small, just a single-room cellar with a vaulted ceiling that didn't move an inch since it was built, this small size proving that at the time this was probably for family consumption and virtually ervery town house had its wine cellar underneath. Before using this cute little cellar as a facility, Mito Inoue was working (before this one) in a cellar in Chanonat 20 km away but this was far from her main vineyard of gamay. Now, this one has a really limilted room but right now she can manage to make the volumes yielded by her small vineyard surface but one day she may have to look for another cellar when this one is too cramped (I'm sure the next one will be as cute and authentic as this one...).

On the picture above/right you can see a few grafts that she made herself and stores on the cellar stairs soaking in a bucket of water. This is a try with syrah and grenache but it's too late to plant now, usually she say's it has to be done by may, and now it's too dry. From what I understand she planted 38 such baby vines and it was quite tough to plant then using the pic to dig a hole.

Asked if she goes back to Japan regularly she says she hasn't gone there since 2010, she'd like to but she hasn't the time to, plus ideally she'd like to stay 3 months to have the time to enjoy the trip and see people. Maybe one day in winter after Les Dix Vins Cochons (the Auvergne tasting event where she drops each year), from early december to the following march.

The barrels To day that's basically Mito's facility, the simpliest one you can imagine : a vaulted room with two barrels, two plastic vats, a stack of picking boxes and a few bottles. Her production is small enough so that she can stick the lables by hand after filling the bottles by gravity. Mito Inoue always vinifies her wines in casks but she uses the plastic vats nonetheless. For example last year she put grapes for a two-week maceration in this caged plastic tank on the right (these one-cubic-meter caged tanks are found everywhere in France and often used to store water) like she learnt at Gilles Azzoni in Ardèche. She made her own cuvée of white over there and as there was no other vat available she used such a tank and it worked fine.
Last year Mito lost much of her grapes because of the august hailstorm, like for Pierre Beauger, and that's why she made a single cask in 2013. Her vineyard surface is very small too, so even when frost or hailtsorms don't ruin her crop she still has a small production, her Gamay surface being 76 ares (0,76 hectare) and her newly acquired Pinot Blanc making a mere 10 ares. She works on the side for fruit growers (organic apples) to make a living, but this year the grower lost much because of hailstorms, so she doesn't know if she'll have work for the picking. She also works on Pierre Beauger's vineyard because he needs an aide.

To make things worse in 2013 the maturity was not good because it rained most of july and during the harvest, so her alcohol level is very low also

Tasting the Gamay outside the cellar We're tasting the gamay 2013, a sample taken from one of the barrels. I notice the bung on the top of the barrel, Pierre Beauger uses similar ones if I remember, Mito learnt with the right teachers....

The wine is still "working", it is a bit turbid, with nice appealing light color. She had an analysis made in march and the malolactic was not completed yet. The wine was much more acidic than now, it changed for the better, she says with a laugh, feeling relieved by what she drinks today. Fruity notes, acidulous candy too. Sugar seems to be eaten by now, and it remains acidic, but not excessively for my taste, I like that. She says that a few months ago it was so more pronounced, she had people taste it at the Dix Vins Cochons 2013 (the Auvergne-most wine tasting event) and people had their eyes popping up asking, what's that ?!? they couldn't believe this was a red wine, it tasted so much like an acidic white.

But well, I feel she's somehow relieved that the wine had changed toward a more civilized route compared to a few months earlier. I ask how much alcool this makes, risking a 10, but she answers not even 10, it makes 9,24 % from the analysis. And she picked the grapes along two weeks to select the ripest clusters but it was not ripening and she ended up picking them all. This was from mid october to early november, she worked alone for the picking because there was so little fruit to pick. Otherwise she gets the help of another picker but this year she could do almost without.

Listening to the Gamay Speaking of sulfites she never used any, at any stage, since she worked with Gilles Azzoni, not on the incoming grapes, not at bottling or at any time during the vinification, totally SO2 free, there's not even the use of a sulphur wick to cleanse the empty cask.

At one point Mito puts her ear on the barrel, she checks if the gamay is still bubbling, and how strong. I'm amazed she can hear anything that way, I usually put my ear over the opening on the top for that. She topped up the barrel recently with a bottle where there was still residual sugar, so she wanted to see if it somehow "awakened" the wine into fermenting again. She didn't do it purposedly but it happened that she only had this juice to use for topping up.

Pouring from a bottle : Plume 2012 Mito Inoue hasn't many cuvées, so I didn't expect to taste from countless barrels, but she still opened a bottle of Plume 2012 and I thank her for that. Mito made other cuvées in the past, and you can find these elusive bottle labels on the web, like Mitologie or Chicci, all Vins de France (table wines) with very poetic labels. These rare bottles are I'm sure prized collectibles, and the labels play their part.

The bottles are closed with crown caps (no corks here), like Pierre Beauger who began working this way long ago. the color of the gamay is light and vivid. On the nose, fruit coming out. A bit turbid, Mito says that she never racks the wine before bottling, she does it by gravity straight from the cask, no filtration no fining. She isn't using a sulphur wick when she empties a cask, she just coordinated the timing. She kept some of the previous cuvée, Mitologie 2011 in the bottom of the cask (actually wine with lees) and poured the following wine/juice on it (Plume 2012). She found it was sad to get rid of these lees and kept them in the bottom as a souvenir, a trace of Mitologie to be used by the next cuvée.

there's more substance compared to the 2013 which we tasted from the barrel, there were more grapes with more maturity. This makes 13 % in alcohol but feels 11,5 or 12. She's a bit annoyed by this 13 % but I feel that's fine. She pressed some of the grapes for a pied de cuve and she put whole-clustered grapes on the top in the vertical white vat. She didn't spray CO2 over the top, there's just grape juice here. Someone said to her it looked like a Poulsard, not Gamay, she says with a laugh.

The grapes were picked in october 2012, but part of the fruit was eaten by the wild boars coming down from the woods. Mito says that she pressed part of the grapes and kept the rest whole-clustered, putting the whole together in a vat to ferment/macerate, for a total volume of a single barrel that year also. This year she asked the hunters to do something about them because they're too many in this area for the crops. She's also put in place some protection against the birds, using nets along the woods as their take a toll on the grapes too.

On her parcel of gamay To visit the first parcel with Mito, I left my motorbike on the central square in Champeix and we drove in her Citroën to Vinzelles, the 60-year-old gamay. Mito seems to be now well accustomed and at ease with French ways, she drives a car and so on, but she says it was not easy at the beginning, she decided to take driving lessons because there are a few differences with the Japanese driving rules. She bought a first car but it was a second hand (she only buys cheap used cars) and it wasn't a very reliable car, if cheap, and she changed cars with little luck, a Fiat, a soviet-made Lada and then a Peugeot, before ending up recently with this Citroen ZX which she hopes will make the job at last. I reassure her, saying that B. had the same car for years (many winery profiles were made using it) and that it's very reliable and user friendly (if not with a very sexy design). I admire Mito for her ease at driving along the winding roads of Auvergne, especially that in the cold or rainy months that must be sometimes arduous, especially on the grass roads. I'm not sure I'd be as comfortable driving on the left side of the road in the back country of Kyushu (also a volcanic area) and with a steering wheel on the right side of the car... She is very lucky to work and live in this area, passing through villages that are all so beautiful, like this fortified village of Saint-Floret (pic on right) on the road to her second parcel at Courgoul,

Mito does all her vineyard work by hand, she has no tractor, using a pick to till, a backpack sprayer and a trimmer wire to cut the grass. This parcel makes 76 ares (0,76 hectare) and it was farmed a few years ago by Fred Gounan who stopped using it because it was much lower than his other vineyards and he had problems adapting the tools. The parcel is partly surrounded by woods and the setting is very nice and peaceful, but sometimes conventional wheat growers come near there with their big tractors and Mito says that more than once she just turned around to avoid the noise and sprayings, coming back at a more quiet time. Sometimes they even spray when the weather is dry and there's no need, once she stayed while the tractor was spraying nearby down the slope and she had a headache all night, so now she just turn around when she falls upon the machines heading for her small valley. She farms organic but she is not certified.
Asked if she'd take an additional surface if given the opportunity, she says yes, but if the vineyard is in good shape, and it has to be at a reasonable distance from Champeix or Montaigut, not 50 km away.

An old vine of Gamay d'Auvergne The drive on the grass road to her gamay was very nice, a winding trail through woods, hedges and fields, and then the gamay on the slope. As soon as Mito stepped out of the car she rushed to a small tank to water the few lines of vegetables that she planted between the lower rows. I didn't understand immediately when she spoke of a petit potager (small kitchen garden) while getting out of the car but I soon realized that she was not watering her vines but indeed the vegetables between the rows that you could mistake for weeds...

The inter-row width is particularly big, something like 2,5 meters and she had the good idea to plant different varieties of vegetables including Japanese ones. The problem is that there's no well or running water around here, so she has to keep some sort of water reserves which she brings occasionally with her car and leaves near the improvised vegetable garden. Whenever she comes here, she pours some water on the vegetables when it's dry. There are risks with the rabbits and other wild animals but she planted her kitchen crops far from the woods in hope they'll not come down there, plus there are plenty of delicious weeds for them all over the vineyard, especially that the whole block is chemical free.

This woman is marvelous, she tends a garden in the midst of her vineyard in a remote corner of a valley, almost like she learning to live in autarcy with the basic ingredients. I remember an iconic Japanese movie from 1960 directed by Kaneto Shindō, The Naked Island (music by Hikaru Hayashi), where a family struggles to keep their crop alive on a desert island, bringing heavy loads of water for that. Mito says that her grandfather who is a farmer in Kyushu near Kagoshima (with an active volcanoe, by the way...), and I'm sure that this comes out in her genes.

Picking herbs in a field Speaking of weeds, Mito says that she has noticed many herbs and plants in and near the parcel. When she says "noticed" I must say that she seems to have a deep knowledge of these plants and herbs because faced with these plants I wouldn't have been able to recognize them or associate them to a particular property, except nettles which we all know is good for many things under the form of herb tea or compost. She shows me a particular plant near a vineyard pole first, this is Yarrow (Achillée millefeuille in French) then another, each having healing properties for the vines through decoction and sprayings. You leave Yarrow heads (flowers) macerate 24 hours in a tank with water (40 gr for 10 liters) and you just spray on the vineyard against fungi.

Mito then walks me to a next field next to the parcel, it's full of high weeds and looks like an overgrown prairie. There, she goes straight to a particular spot where year after year a particular herb grows on about the surface of two square meters, this is horsetail (Prêle in French), it works well too against fungi, and to stimulate the vines also. she says it's rare to find this plant in this configuration (it's usually along sreams or rivers) but for some reason it feels well there, this could mean that there's water at a relatively shallow depth underneath.
Elsewhere she shows me the large leaves of burdock (Bardane in French) which look like rhubarb, she says it works well against mildew, this year she managed not to spray Bordeaux mix (copper & sulfur) and relied on the herbs instead. She doesn't like the Bordeaux mix even though it's sanctioned in organic farming, and sometimes when her skin rubs leaves sprayed with Bordeaux mix she physically feels bad. She'll use the mix only when disease really threats.
This prairie is not sprayed with chemicals and she likes to explore it for plants. She points me another plant which she says is good to heal insect bites (bees, spiders and so on), you just rub the weed against the sore spot and it vanishes away. Then she shows me another which is edible but when picked at a younger stage.

I'm amazed, this knowledge of plants is gold, especially in France where herbalism is not as mainstream as in Germany. The French government edicted a law in 1941 to limit its use and it was never repealed (some say it was to promote the pharmaceutical industry). This all reminds the lawsuit by the French state and the seed industry against the non-profit Kokopelli for helping distribute seeds of ancient vegetable varieties, which ended up with Kokopelli being fined 35 000 €, and this under the pretext that these varieties were "unregistered in the official catalog of allowed seeds" (sic). We find here the same pattern to curtail real products and promote industrial groups, and the European Union follows exactly the same policy.

Checking a vine The parcel of gamay also breathes health and happiness, you can lay down in the sun without fearing for unexpected side effects except insect itching. There are a few lone vines of Syrah and Grenache in this parcel (the latter being given to her by Alain Castex in Banyuls), it probably brings complexity to the whole. Here and there tiny walnut trees grow, and she has to regularly till and take them out, a walnut has probably been brought there by a rodent and took root.
At one point Mito says she'd like to have hens on the vineyard, they'd find their food along the rows and leave their beneficial droppings, all the while providing eggs, but the problem is having a small coop here, a fenced shack to protect them from foxes and other predators, and having to be there in the morning and evening to open and close the door and pick the eggs...

She was to do the debudding soon after this visit, she also takes down a few leaves here and there by hand, so that there's a good ventilation through the foliage. There are not many clusters per vines, maybe two or three. The shoots don't go up too much, this is not Syrah, and she don't trim them, her philosophy is to as much as possible leave the vine live its life. Ealier in the year she put some manure at the foot of the vines when she tilled, in order to stimulate a bit this old vineyard. She has this vineyard since 2011 and she didn't use Bordeaux mix (copper-sulfur) in 2011, using whey instead, but it doesn't work here. She uses macerated nettles tea with also horsetail and burdock since 2012 (works well against mildew and black rot), in addition to some Bordeaux mix at low doses. On organic farming you're allowed to spray 3 kg per hectare/year and she used only 500 gr. She never had oidium, just a bit of mildew here.

The Pinot Blanc Back in Champeix, I take my motorbike to follow Mito to her other vineyard, which is located in a remote valley inside the The Auvergne Volcanoes Regional Park, we follow roads winding along fresh valleys with streams on the side, we pass beautiful villages and we arrive at Courgoul, population 70 (in the background down the slope on the picture above), near which Mito took over a few tiny terraces planted with Pinot Blanc. A century ago or more this village was more inhabited, it had three cafés and as bypass roads hadn't been built yet this narrow valley was a thorough rout for the transportation of goods heading north.

She was given the use of this vineyard by a non-profit group, Les Pailhats de Courgoul, which is restoring ancient terraces (Pailhat means terrace in the local idiom) used in the past by local farmers. The terraces and their stone walls had been overgrown with bushes and trees after decades of neglect and the non-profit group was allowed by the park authority to bring these slopes back to their former life. They did it with hard manual work and planted this vineyard on a few of these terraces. Then they looked for a grower to take care of these vines and they found Mito, through Pierre Beauger who couldnt add this parcel to his own workload. The surface is very small : 10 ares (0,1 ha) with 400 vines (it's not been all planted) but this is still a hard work for Mito because she has to walk a long distance from the village carrying her tools, but she loves the place, it's so peaceful and beautiful, a dream of a vineyard. There will be more vines planted here this autumn and a few years will be needed for a normal harvest. The soil is thick with basalt, this is a volcanic area.
These vines have never been sprayed, either by the non-profit group or herself and until now thery seem healthy and fine. If she needs to spray she'd have to bring water up to this terrace and she doesn't want to, it'd be indeed a tough job. She may build a small shack one of these days under the sade of the trees along the terraces, if she is allowed to, the place is so peaceful you just want to sit and look at the valley, and then she could store a bit of rain water maybe.

Mito at work The good thing here is that there's no conventional grower around, it is a corner of heaven (un petit coin de paradis) like Mito says in French with a laugh. Under the planted terraces there is more plantable surface but someone in the non-profit group grows medicinal herbs there, and she like the idea because she will find more natural medicine there for her vines. These people also planted different fruit trees along the dirt path going up the slope, as well as aromatic herbs. They also set up a few bee hives. Among the plants found here along the dirt path there is comfrey (Consoude in French), it is widely used on organic gardening, it helps the vine or the vegetable grow with more energy. She planted some by the way on her kitchen garden between the rows of gamay, but it's still very small. She recounts a funny anecdote about someone she knows who had bought horses that were weak and tired, the guy gave them lots of comfrey with their feed and after a year they were strong and full of energy... Otherwise, she can find lots of horsetail growing naturally along the small river at Courgoul.

The pinot blanc is split on 4 successive terraces, the other good thing with these terraces is that there's no frost here in spite of the altitude, the fros happening usually in the lower part of a valley. Hailstorm is rare too, she says, although she farms it since this june only. Like you can see the vines grow along a pole, on the échalas trellis system, it could have better been trained in goblet but the people who planted the vines didfn't know, and now it's a bit late to change the vine training, so she keeps the echalas. She is still wndering if she'll tie the shoots or not, last year some of the shoots that hadn't been attached to the pole gave more fruit than the others, so she still ponders the issue, she may keep both to see what yields the best result. Some vines seem very happy and one of them has 16 separate clusters, she'll have to tie this one otherwise with the weight it'll lay down.
There are a few vines of pinot noir too, maybe ten, they'll be vinified with the white.
The last terrace is very small and the pinot blanc was planted last spring.

Reaching the terraces with the pinot blanc An important part of the work achieved by the non-profit group that lends this land to Mito has been to restore the walls which had been built stone by stone by the population centuries ago, including the stairs built on a very original way with flat stones protruding from the wall (pic above on left and in the video), very ingenious indeed.

In this video you will have a better understanding of why she really loves this vineyard, the long walk from the road is tempered by all these medicinal or aromatic herbs that she spots along the way, and the more you climb the better the view on the narrow valley and the village of Courgoul. This particular valley is named Gorges de Courgoul, gorges meaning canyon in French. The small river running along it is the Couze de Valbeleix. In the 19th century this valley was a busy road, sort of, connecting two regions.

Mito Inoue's wines can be found in Paris at the Cave des Papilles, Saturne, Vivant (she hasn't sold at Vivant lately though).
Her wines are exported to Sweden (Vin & Natur) and Denmark (Hvirvelvin - but not lately)

Mito Inoue 2 rue de la Passerelle Champeix 63320 mitomito19 [at] hotmail [dot] com

Comments

[Mat]

What an amazing place and a great post to match! love reading your blog! Cheers

[Roelof Ligtmans]

Well Bertrand, you seem to have set a new record for "micro-winery", or should I say "nano-winery". The picture of the Gamay vineyard makes me worry a bit, there is a lot of green stuff not being vines. In my experience in Burgundy, if I leave that much grass, I end up harvesting very few grapes if any - the vines do not like the competition. But maybe Auvergne is a blessed terroir alltogether ...

[Bert]

Thank you Mat, that was my pleasure to visit the place...
Roelof : I often feel the same in different vineyards I visit but here is seemed to me that the soil was draing well and that there wasn't much water anyway. I think the weeds take actually much of their water through the morning dew, not necessarily through the water already present in the ground (my theory...)

[Naoki]

Thanks for a great report on Mito. She looks muscular now compared to her when I met eight years ago.
I am very happy to watch her on your blog!

[michelle]

Plants, also called green plants (Viridiplantae in Latin), are multicellular eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. They form a clade that includes the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and the green algae. Plants exclude the red and brown algae, the fungi, archaea and bacteria.