Noizay, Loire
On of the last times I met Lisanne was when she was working in Montlouis at the wine bar of Lise & Bertrand Jousset (scroll down to the 4th picture in the linked story), the young Dutch was obviously well versed into natural wines and aimed already at something else. Now that's it she starts her own domaine with associate Benjamin Serer whom she met last year while doing her one-year training at the wine school of Amboise.
Both of them have extensive experience in the restaurant business, lisanne was a sommelier and Benjamin was a
chef in Alain Ducasse restaurants. Both of them trained afterwards in different wine farms, Benjamin at Mathieu Cosme in Noizay, Vincent Carême in Vouvray, also at Philippe Foreau there. Lisanne worked more on the Montlouis side, the sister Appellation : she first actually came over here in the Loire with working with Noella Morantin in 2013 further south from here, helping a few days now and then to work in the vineyard including of course for the picking. Then she met other vignerons like Bertrand Jousset and also Toby Bainbridge in Anjou and that's when she began to want to do something of her own. She was still living in Holland and Belgium back then, commuting now and then to the region for vineyard stints and she ended up moving here in the Loire in march 2017 for that purpose.
I visited Lisanne and Benjamin early october, reaching their troglodytic chai in Noizay on my motorbike, this is just a short distance from the beautiful town of Amboise along the Loire river. This village has dozens of such cellars dug into the sandstone of the hill, these cellars were used for generations for winemaking and each of them is unique. Here there are even upper stories with rooms with fireplaces and chimney ducts so that people or workers could live there. Given that from up there you can see the river many of them have been turned into vacation residences or even outright primary residence.
During her one-year-long time at the wine school lisanne learnt also the administrative part of managing a winery in France, which is very useful when you're a foreigner. And even though she already had a good training on the field through her months spent with the vignerons both in the vineyard and in the cellar, she needed to get the wine-school degree in order to be legally allowed to open a winery and get vineyards. The curriculum is mainstream of course, not particularly bent on natural winemaking but that's still useful to know everything that can be done in a winery, even if aftherthen she'll follow her own wishes in terms of vinification philosophy.In a certain way, conventional winemaking is an entirely different job but knowing it is interesting.
Pictured here are some of the vats they bought, they found everything second-hand, for example buying the tanks from vignerons from the area that were retiring. these are mostly fiber-plastic tanks, that's what they can afford, they'll see if this works well, they're not sure stainless-steel is better, there's the magnetic field or electric conductivity issue, they'll see in the future what is best for their wines. For now they have enough vessels, next year they'll maybe buy a few more barrels.
Lisanne and Benjamin set up their business together since this year (2018) and they are having their first vintage vinified from purchased grapes. Right before that, from 2006 to 2017, Benjamin had been managing Le Caméléon, a bar in Tours.
He is a native from Tours and has been living in this village of Noizay since 2010. He has always been appreciating Chenin a lot as well as Vouvray wines, he says they're going to make table wines this year (no Appellation wines, that is), there may also not be Chenin among their cuvées this year but they're getting familiar with the other varieties. Later of course both of them would like to have parcels of their own and do the next step with working from estate vineyards. When you buy grapes even if they're organic which is what they do, you don't have a hand dirtectly on the grapes and farming, but that's the easiest way to begin with your own winery.
The region which still has a good diversity in terms of landscape (it's not a monoculture region) still offers good opportunities for an aspiring vigneron who looks for parcels of his own. Of course you have to have your own intel among the locals and try to learn about vacancies before others. Even though something on the Vouvray Appellation will be more expensive than a generic Touraine Appellation it is still affordable compared to other regions, especially if you find a vineyard with a tricky access which other established wineries will snub.
Here is one of the cellar rooms, as you guess the temperature is pretty stable, there rooms communicate through vaulted passages, it's very beautiful and harmonious, I always tend to think [I may be wrong but that's my Steinerian background where I learnt that architecture has a hidden influence on humans] that this can't be neutral for wines to be made in such beautiful places.
For this first vintage they bought grapes both in the Loire and beyond, like for example from Alsace from a biodynamic domaine. It was not their initial intention
but because of lower volumes this year in many parts of the Loire (as a result of mildew)
they had to look elsewhere as well. They bought to Domaine Luc Faller in Alsace and if the experience is good they might repeat it next year even if the volumes return to normality in the Loire by then. From the start they decided to buy only grapes from organic-farmed vineyards both because that's their common philosophy with Lisanne and because the natural vinification they intend needs organic grapes for a healthy yeast population. Lisanne adds that they want to work with indigenous varieties from the region like Grolleau and others, otherwise here they found gamay and Cabernet Franc and in Alsace they bought Riesling, Pinot Gris & Pinot Blanc. Benjamin says that for a first vintage anyway it's better not to have too many cuvées and focus on a few and do them well.
What they bought in terms of volume of grapes this year will allow them to make about 15 000 bottles, which is not bad for a first vintage. It would make between 3 and 4 hectares if you take an average yield of 40 hectoliters/hectare. And they'll keep working on the side, working in the vineyards of other vignerons, and this way they'll keep learning the vineyard management, which will be useful when in the future they'll get parcels of their own.
They looked around for a facility or a chai and for economic reasons they favored renting over purchasing or building. when you start a winery you have already vats and miscellaneous tools to buy and renting is the best option.
They found this unused vinification cellar to rent, it hadn't been used for a long time but still had a few cement vats and this custom-made press fitting exactly in
this corner of the main cellar room.
You can guess in the foreground the square opening of the underground tank where the pressed juice would typically setlle for its gross lees to deposit. This thing is probably a 100 years old, possibly even older (1860 ?), and there are certainly many other similar vertical presses sitting idly in the neighboring troglodytic cellars of this village. That's alas hard to find one to buy because the families who own them are reluctant to let them go, even if it would mean making them alive again thanks to a young vigneron setting up shop. The problem here is that local owners are sentimentally attached to these pieces of real estate where generations of their forefathers have worked and made wine.
Actually the owners still used this place but only for dinner or lunch parties, the owner being a hunter and he ans his fellow hunters would cook and eat here now and then, there are several rooms upstairs with a gorgeous view over the Loire river (pic on right) and as I understand that makes another sound reason they want to keep this place in the family.
Lisanne didn't keep a day job here in france but she plans to travel back to Australia again in the northern hemisphere winter and make some wine there. She's
been there several time and the natural wine movement is pretty vibrant in the country. the fact
that she hasn't yet vineyards of her own to take care of here in the Loire leaves her plenty of time in winter when the wine is quietly on its way. She'll pick in february in
Australia, this will be Chardonnay, Savagnin, Riesling, Cabernet Franc and this will be from what I understand at James Erskine's Jauma Wines where she's been several times. Someone over there will afterthen keep an eye on her wines and the wines will be sold in Australia only.
Actually Lisanne already made wine in 2017 with another vigneron and has a pallet of it here in the cellar (picture on left), this is her cuvée Beau Gosse 2016, a Cabernet Franc fermented for the beginning a stainless-steel vat from destemmed grapes, then in a barrel. I tasted it when I visited Bertrand Jousset's wine bar in Montlouis, and wrote back then that the wine is dry, no sugar left, it's unfiltered and there was no SO2 at all added, including for bottling. For a first try it's pretty nice, very delicate and refined. This wine is already meant to be sold in the United States through Tess Bryant Selections (Tess Bryant being a young importer who is starting in the trade), this pallet should be shipped some day soon to California.
Otherwise the plasting tanks here are full with the juice from both Alsace and the Loire, and there are also grapes in a tank with which Lisanne and Benjamin are going to deal with today (picture on right).
When I visited, Benjamin and Lisanne were in the process to fill the press with Riesling grapes after they'd macerated in a plastic tank for 11 or 12 days for a try. They travelled to Alsace to pick the grapes themselves with the local team of pickers and they destemmed the grapes right on the spot in the vineyard. they had brought the
destemmer and the tank and hauled back the whole to here.
They had it ferment with fermenting juice and it began to ferment right away so that they didn't have to put CO2. THey basically didn't touch it, no pumping over here, they just gently pushed the cap down every other day so as to keep it wet. They used a refrigerated truck for the other tanks that were filled with juice. This skin-maceration try on Riesling will make a volume of about 10 hectoliters.
Asked if they were inspired by other similar skin maceration wines for Riesling, Lisanne says they haven't encountered many, except for Rudolf Trossen in the Mosel who uses long macerations for some of his whites, the resulting wines being sometimes exceptionnals and others surprising. Also she likes the wines of Jean-Pierre Rietsch in Alsace although she's not sure he does skin maceration, same with Patrick Meyer. Anyway it's rare that Riesling is used for maceration, usually it's more Muscat or Pinot Gris (the latter is often used in Australia for maceration), and they wanted to make a try, choosing a relatively short maceration time so as not to get too much extraction.
Lisanne grabs a glass to have me taste this juice, she says they taste it regularly because they don't want to go too far, Riesling is very aromatic and an excessive skin maceration could be harmful, it could be tiring if it's hyper floral, you might drink a glass and stop there, and wine has to be easy drinking more than
an excercise in extraction. When you taste the juice you have to anticipate the additional
tannin extraction that will occur at pressing, that's the trick. The juice is beautifully sweet and enjoyable, for someone like me it's not obvious to spot when skin maceration is enough, but they know better... Lisanne says also that for their first vintage they don't want to take excessive risk for such a trial, but they like what they taste here.
After this one we tasted a direct-press Riesling from another tank, very different color indeed, darker, even though it's made from the same grapes (pic of the glass on right). The juice is even more sweet, it's still on the very beginning of the fermentation and the orange, almost-brownish color comes from the oxygen but it will dwindle back to a lighter color some time ahead. What is funny here is that the "orange wine" is bright yellow and the direct press wine is orange... Lisanne says that thety also made a try with part of the Cabernet Franc to make a sparkling Blanc de Noir, and they'll also make natural sparkling with Riesling, Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc. They'll make of course also still wines, reds and whites.
Bucket after bucket, the press get filled. they found the press in Vernou, a small village not far from here, the vigneron they got it from was buying a larger, more modern press. It's a Vaslin 22 VT, it was probably made in the late 80, I found plenty of them for sale on the Web for between 300 and € 2000 €, i
didn't know you could find such elaborate
tools for this cheap. This is one of the reasons I think why France is still a terrific place to make wine to this day, vineyards can be very affordable to rent or buy in certain regions and second-hand tools are plentiful and often cheap, plus fellow winemakers sometimes give you stuff for free.
Speaking of their planned sales for their wines in the future, they're lucky to have connections through their former jobs, so the wines will find their market, some will be exported in the United States, Australia, Belgium. They don't know yet if they take their wines to a wine fair, that could be. For sure they'll show their wines at the next Bulles au Centre, the natural sparkling fair in Montrichard in july. Lisannr is now also part of Vivent les Vins Libres, a group that organizes a wine tasting event every year in Paris and also abroad, and next year in april (around april 14 2019) they'll be having one in both Hong Kong and Singapore, this may help find buyers in Asia. Of course it would be nice to sell locally in the Loire but they'll not be available permanently in the cellar to receive the public. Of course venues like Amicalement Vin near Amboise (they have a terrific wine portfolio) will certainly haver their wines, as well as other places focused on natural wine in the region like Bertrand Jousset's wine bar.
While Lisanne and Benjamin were loading the press, her parents showed up. they drove all the way from Holland (near Utrecht) and are staying here for a couple of weeks to see their daughter, they don't speak French but thanks to Lisanne who introduced
them to her favorite beverage they now appreciate and drink
wine (they weren't drinking any in the past).
This wasn't entirely over for the picking when I visited, Benjamin told me that they still had the Cabernet Franc to pick on the following week (they'll use their boxes, picture on left), and they'd follow this same process but with 3 times this volume of grapes, and this time they'll use a tank which is easier to rack at the end of the maceration, this is a self-emptying vat (cuve autovidante, see picture on right) with a large opening and a slopped bottom.
Everything will be labelled as Vin de France (table wine) for now as long as they're using purchased grapes, and Lisanne says that she is quite puzzled by the Appellation system and its odd rules. for example here the village where they have this chai is located in the Vouvray Appellation zone and because of this, they're not even allowed to make any sparkling that is not under the Appellation, meaning that they technically can't make their pet-nat here and so they'll have to haul the wine on the other side of the Loire (outside the Appellation zone) to do the tirage (fill the bottles with the residual sugar)... In neighboring Montlouis (where they'll haul their wine) there's no such narrow rule, you can make a Pet'Nat Vin de France on their premises.
At one point Alexandre who also starts making wine further down in the street dropped for a few minutes, he was looking for something for his CO2 and Lisanne helped him with what they had. Solidarity is a permanent fixture of those artisan domaines and you always can count with you fellow winemakers, which is convenient when they're next door.
I asked Benjamin about the first wines they'll release, he says the Gamay will be released pretty early in early 2019 probably and same for the natural sparkling or even earlier for the latter, it depends how the fermentation will unfold, quietly or briskly. We're looking forward to tasting the wines of Lisanne and Benjamin, and if not before that could be possible next july in Montrichard south from here as they attend the natural-sparkling fair there...
The press has a total capacity of 22 hectoliters and there are 10 hectoliters of Riesling, so they'll not fill it. They put a tarpaulin around the press to get around the fact there's no cement slab outside the cellar and it's important to prevent dust from the dirt ground to get into the juice. Once le last bucket of grapes is in the press, they'll start the pressing which will last some 4 hours, they use it on the manual mode and will stop when appropriate. they took away the chains that are normally mounted inside the press because they tend ti truturate too much the grapes.
There's no temperature control in these cellars other than the natural inertia of the depths under the hill. Benjamin says that colder nights were forecast in the next few days and they'll probably open the doors of the cellar to cool down the inside and moderate the fermentation temperature, the tanks being close to the door. It's also better for the aromas to slow down the fermentation temperature. And for the pet'nats, if the fermentation is too swift, there's a risk to pass the targetted level of residual sugar, a critical point where the juice has to be bottled.
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