Thésée, Touraine Loire
It's been a while since I first met Noélla Morantin, this was years ago at a time she hadn't yet started her own domaine and was working with Japanese vigneronne Junko Arai just on the other side of the Cher river in Pouillé,
producing remarkable natural wines from the terroirs on the slopes and plateau above
Pouillé. The issue when you set up a domaine in a region where you have no family roots and/or no heavy financial backing is to find/finance a facility all the while building the vineyard part of the domaine with the appropriate tools, and Noella followed the usual way, renting for several years a wine farm belonging to Catherine Roussel (formerly Clos Roche Blanche), I loved the place at La Tesnière and Noëlla sure did but she had to leave and build her own facility.
By chance this part of Touraine isn't too hot a real-estate market and there are plenty of opportunities, both for a house to live and for a business, given you'll consider doing some fixing and repairs to adapt the buildings to your needs. Noëlla was looking for a while and she and Philippe found this place in the middle of Thésée, just on the other side of the Cher river using this cute one-lane bridge (pic on left). You reach the winery through a 100-meter-long lane from the main street (named Rue Nationale) and you arrive to two large cellars dug in soft sandstone in the side of the hill, in front of which they built the facility.
Using as a support the vertical cliff in which the old cellars tunnels had their opening, they built this wooden warehouse with a porchroof. The empty lot in front of the hillside was large enough to house this additional construction and still allow for trucks or machinery to move around outside. Here on the picture they were unloading a truckload of Sauvignon for pressing. You can see on the right where the vertical hillside stands, and you can imagine that there are such cellars all along the village, in the backyard of the houses along the main street. Most owners nowadays don't really use them, but the few remaing vignerons in Thésée use them, like Bruno Allion for example. By the way, Thésée is now home to quite a few natural-wine vintners in addition to Bruno & Noëlla, with Damien Menut, Joël Courtault, Olivier Bellanger, and there are also a couple of other interesting domaines like the one of Vincent Ricard...
Compared to la Tesnière where she hadn't much room here it's very convenient, with the stable-temperature cellar on the same level, allowing Noëlla to move loads swiftly with her electric forklift. As you can see the wooden structure is backed directly on the hillside. Here Noëlla is moving boxed of Sauvignon to the press. They had a cement slab poured, with the adequate wastewater recovery system which they oversaw with the local water service. I don't know if the village administration is aware of this but yet another artisan vintner setting shop right in the middle of the village is going to add to the fame of the village, in addition to the incredible Roman ruins of Mazelles, a standing structure that has been built just outside Thésée 1900 years ago in the 2nd century...
This was just a moment before, Noëlla and staff unload the boxes (her friend Katrina on the right). She lost much of her potential harvest this year with the frost of late april (many growers of the region were badly hit), she made maybe yields of about 10 hectoliters/hectare in 2017, much less that normal. Mikaël Bouges (an organic grower of the region) was the first to offer her the access to his own grapes if she needed, and these Sauvignon grapes come from his vineyard which didn't suffer as much. He has a total vineyard surface of 10 or 11 hectares and he farms organic, adding also biodynamic preps. Last year he had almost all his parcels badly hit by frost but not this year or very little.
Faverolles-sur-cher near which the parcel sits isn't far away, it's on the other side of the river a few kilometers further east, and she uses for convenience a rented truck to bring the boxes back to the chai on harvest days.
Two seasonal workers who
had also spent the day picking were helping load the press, Brian the bearded man (nicknamed the "biker") and Thomas, his 16-year-old brother-in-law. The volume of grapes was just about the same than the pneumatic-press capacity and they had to fork the bunches right and left in order to be able to put all of them in the same batch.
Just to have you imagine the hidden gems in the backyards of many houses in the region, look at the cellars on the left (I was really tempted to jump and sneak into these cavities): they belong to a private house sitting along the main street and that's on their land lot, sitting against the hill right after their garden. The people who live there with their 4 children don't make wine but you guess that not so long ago in the mid-20th century all these cellars were some sort of family chais where the owners made wine from their own parcels above the hill. Have a look again on the remains I found in such an abandonned micro-cellar a few years ago. The region has certainly hundreds of such cellars that sit forgotten in the backyard of old houses.
After the sauvignon was successfully loaded into the press and Noëlla came back from the car rental
>where she returned the truck, she opened a bottle of her pet-nat 2016 (Marie Rose) and filled glasses for everyone, sitting on benches under the porch roof on a mild late-summer day and enjoying the end of a good workday. Lucie (center, turning back), Brian's wife, joined with her baby, she also worked for Noëlla and will come back in her staff (looks like she knows lots of things in the trade).
On the left you can see Katrina, a longtime friend of hers who came to help for the harvest, they knew each other when Noëlla was a student in Nantes back in 1994, lots of shared memories...
a couple weeks later I visited Noëlla again as they had just brought the load of a parcel of gamay in. Again, these are grapes purchased to Mikael Bouges. This was the last jour de vendange, the last harvest day, be it from her own vineyards or the purchased grapes (which she picks herself with her picking team). Beyond the frost losses which of course complicate the work, the harvest unfolded under a great weather, there has been virtually no rain during the harvest season and the conditions were fine for the pickers (no heat to endure), there were just a few cold mornings.
Unlike with the sauvignon, Noëlla and Philippe (who was helping that day) offered a drink and something
to eat to the small team of pickers before taking care of the destemming of the gamay. This was 11 am or noon and the pickers were happy to celebrate with some tasty charcuterie and these gorgeous wones. If I remember the white was her Old Vines Sauvignon LBL [a parcel formerly belonging to les Bois Lucas] and the red was a delicious Gamay, both from 2016 if I'm right. That was another beautiful day under the porch rook, I'm sure this spot will see a lot of great bottles opened...
We got a visitor, Bruno Allion who lives almost next door (maybe a couple hundreds meters away) passed with his bicycle (which is almost as cute as his vintage Citroën 2CV) on the main street, recognized my motorbike parked there and dropped in to say hello. He didn't stay, even for a glass, he had something to do but that was nice to see him, Bruno has always a funny word, they'll all make a nice group in Thésée (even if he is formally retiring from the trade, I'm sure he'll be a precious help, beginning with the biodynamic preparations).
Looking at Noëlla manouveuring her tractor, I couldn't but think of one of the first image I got from her back in the time when she was working for Junko Arai's Les Bois Lucas in the mid-2000s, this was on the other side of the river on the plateau, andshe was perched atop what seemed to be a huge straddle tractor (also a very old model), going all along the rows in the middle of a parcel. She sure has now already a good experience with these machines and feels at ease at the wheel...
This old Renault 60 has a total width of 1,20 meter and Philippe & Noëlla use it to mow the weeds, move the must (which will be distilled, it's some sort of compulory tax in France), do a few other things but for most of the vineyard work they use their straddle tractor, it's a Loiseau, not the one that belonged to Junko but more or less of the same age. They will not keep the farming equipment here in (or out) the new chai, they'll store it at the cellar she rents to Huguette in Pouillé (scroll down this page to see the cellar), there's lots of room not only in the cellar but also in an open barn in the courtyard of the farm, plus it's closer to the parcels.
When all the pickers had left, Noëlla and Philippe prepared the tronconic wooden fermenter for the gamay. This is their first vinification season in this new facility, very exciting to work in one's own building and cellar. The chai is really well designed with these cellars opening on the same level and allowing an easy transfer of the juice/wine to the barrels. I spoke to Philippe about the layout of this new facility and he told me that having that warehouse built against the hill made things much cheaper thant building including élevage cellars a whole building from scratch. There was already some 150 square meters in the cellar tunnels which just needed some minor improvements.
The place is still work in progress and they're going to range things in a better way, with an area for the labelling, the bottle storage, everything. The warehouse/chai has been built very recenty, if I remember it was finished in july, just in time before the first preparations for the harvest. Noëlla told me that from october they're going to hire Lucie on a 80 % worktime basis, doing different things, cellar work, labelling, tractoring (soil management)... They'll also hire a partime worker to help for pruning in winter.
the gamay is being destemmed, Noëlla monitoring the destemmer and Phillippe with a worker unload the boxes, the destemmed grapes going up
through the coveyor belt to the Grenier fermenter. the maceration in there will last two weeks under CO2, with occasionally juice being pumped on the top to humidify it and also to bring some oxygen to the load. No pied-de-cuve, it will start ferment by itself. For the CO2 they just put some at the beginning and the ensuing fermentation then will produce its own and protect the wine from the outside. The destemmed grapes are ket aside like later the must, they'll carry all that to the state-appointed distiller (for free, the administration considers this like a compuslory tax), that's why they brought the tractor outside.
And I didn't show you the whole cellar, it's full of gems including a small kitchen dug into the rock with an opening on the main tunnel, she'll turn it in a lab but will also able to accomodate professional visitors with decent food I guess because it'll keep part of its kitchen status. In another corner while going through a passage I stumbled on a fireplace (which you can see here from the back), its chimney going all the way through the hill (should have an excellent draft); While this brick fireplace doesn't seem that old, there was certainly an older fire system begore, back in the old days they were very smart, they could both cook terrines or bread and warm up the cellar when the yeast were slowing down...
An excellent producer in the next town (Monthou sur Cher) is Vignobles Dinocheau, a small family-run winery. Thankfully, they don't call themselves "natural," and they make very good wines. We had a very nice visit there last year with the winemaker.
Posted by: Bob Rossi | October 14, 2017 at 05:49 PM