Chargé, Indre-et-Loire (Loire)
There are winemakers who make a difference when there's a gathering of winemakers for a tasting event or a wine fair, the mood will be more eccentric and the vibe wilder if they take part, and Anne Paillet of Autour de l'Anne is one of them (like Pierre Breton, Thierry Puzelat or Brendan Tracey
to name a few others). If they're on the list, take it like a further reason to come and be
ready for a wild ride...And if you see from afar a vibrant and noisy crowd around a tasting stand in the wine fair there's a good chance Anne is the magnet, and her wines of course which are like her enjoyable and easy to drink.
In her former life Anne Paillet spent years on what many people would consider a good job for a large industrial group based just outside Paris and she decided one day in 2010 that it was not the life she wanted. Her now-husband Gregory (they didn't know each other at the time) samely had a job he didn't really like even if it was closer to wine, he was a reporter/writer for Gilbert & Gaillard, a mainstream publication for wines and Champagnes until he quit in 2005 to enroll in a wine school and subsequently set up his winery, Chahut et Prodige. Anne liked wine already at the time, and I mean real wine here, and they met in 2009 in a wine fair in Paris, she says she fell in love with his Coup de Canon 2008 (a 100 % Grolleau) and with the winemaker himself... She wanted to make wine herself already but not necessarilly in the Loire where Gregory had already his winery by then. She knew quite a few people in the Languedoc and her initial plans before she met Gregory was to go there and start something there.
So she settled with Gregory in the Loire Valley but she still thought about setting up her own thing, she wouldn't be content doing the administrative tasks for Gregory and post stories about the winery events on Facebook. Her goal was making wine herself and in her own style and she decided to get through with making wine in the Pic Saint Loup area using purchased grapes from Christophe Beau, she just changes slightly her plans by having the juice and grapes shipped to Gregory's place instead of having a facility over there. She knew quite a lot of wine people in Paris from her years there, like Kevin Blackwell of now-closed Autour d'un Verre (she named her négoce Autour de l'Anne by reference to his venue), also Bertrand at Que du Bon or Guillaume at Coinstot Vino, Cyril at Le Verre Volé and she turned to them when she had her first cuvée.
Anne shares the facility and underground cellars of Gregory, this is allowed by the French wine administration as long as the respective vats and other vessels are clearly apart and counted. Her volume of wine is the equivalent of 4,5 hectares, she says that's fine for her and she doesn't want to make more. Anne says she likes to make cuvées that are not too big and take care of them, instead of having to vinify cuvées making 80 or 100 hectoliters. For example her biggest cuvée this year, Wonder Woman makes 30 hectoliters and the others are smaller, like 15 hectoliters or 2000 to 2500 bottles. She also likes to change and make different types of wines, not stay on a routine.
Anne Paillert buys her grapes from Ludovic Gervais in Pic-Saint-Loup in the Languedoc, the guy is doing a great job in the vineyard and he's also a vegetable grower, all with organic farming of course. He is formost passionate with the growing side, although lately he also took interest to the vinification as well and he's beginning to make wine himself. i ask Anne if it's not worrying for her as he's the grower she relies on for her wines, but she says he has quite a large surface and her purchases there are secure for a long time.
Here Anne stands near another Wonder Woman, namely her Wonder Womanne 2018 on the left in its tank, she says this year the vinification has been capricious this year, actually it was doing too well and too fast in the bottom of the cellar because of higher temperature and vibrant fermentation ambiance in the air, so they moved the juice closer to the door as the following nights were going to get quite cold. For a natural sparkling (a Pet'Nat) you don't want the fermentation to go too fast or you may miss the targeted amount of residual sugar at the bottling. Now she says it's capricious because it got the other way and calmed down too much, that's why they warm the tank a bit with a heating coil.
They enlarged this cellar gallery recently by munching 80 centimeters into the sandstone on one side, in order to make it possible to have two rows of vats and still be able to move one of them out if needed. Again that's the good side with a cellar, you can augment the surface without building permit or additional roof...They subsequently painted the walls with lime, initially because the freshly carved side was contrasting with the brownish ceiling & wall on the other side, but incidently this improved the yeast ambiance the following year, they discovered through this detail that there may have been nefarious activity on ther walls. tHe fermentations were sluggish before and this changed completely with this current vintage, be it for here wines or for Gregory's.
Before Anne took over part of this complex of underground rooms for herself much of these galleries were used to park stuff like tools, tractors, there are enough rooms for the two of them to have their separate facility under the same roof, so to say, but they also share some vat rooms, making sure that the vats have different colors so that they're easily recognizable in case of control by the wine administration (Gregory's are blue, hers are grey). The historic winery
before they settled there used 3 of the galleries to make wine, using a few large cement vats that are still in place but were designed to make large batches of wine made with lab yeast. They make put down some of these tanks to make room but that's quite an investment just to destroy them. There are a few underground tanks too that make about 100 hectoliters.
There even an open elevator to reach this bottle cellar, they use it to move pallets of wine, it was already in place with the former owner. Here the bottles can age at a stable temperature and without light, and the cellar is healthy and dry. Here Anne keeps also bottles of Pot d'Anne 2017 which she didn't want to sell right away because there was some reduction, she tastes one from time to time and will put them on the market when the issue is gone. There is also in there a batch of Gregory's natural sparkling 2017 which is still in its élevage sur lattes, should be disgorged sometime in next few weeks. Anne poses here in front of Gregory's Gamay 2016 last spring and as the wine had a hard time recovering from the bottling he put the bottles to rest there for a few months.
I wish I had seen that but here are the plastic tanks used by Anne to haver her juice or macerating grapes begin to ferment in the truck starting in the Languedoc as the tank would fill one after the other and sit in the truck waiting for the move to her facility here in the Loire. And of course during the trip these wines would keep fermenting in whatever stage they were (some grapes were picked earlier than others of course). Anne says that there hasn't been any bad occurence of mildew in the vicinity where she got her grapes in Corconne near the Pic-Saint-Loup area, unlike other parts of the Languedoc (near Montpellier for example). Languedoc is actually much safer than the Loire for natural accidents like frost, hail and mildew; she had a big attack of mildew in 2012 and made very little wine then because of that, but since then no other problem.
Here is a video shot by an aide back in the Languedoc when they were loading the semi-trailer with the juice, that's really something unique, possibly the first mass vinification in a truck in France. Of course Anne labels all her wines as table wine (Vin de France), no other way when you take grtapes in a region and bring them in a facility of another region, but here we have yet another
dimension, i wonder if the wine administration has ever thought this possible, if yes, they would had invented another more derogatory labelling, like, vin de route (highway wine), who knows ? But like Vin de France it would turn the intent around and become a new cult and sought-after labelling among people in-the-know....
I wished the video who have shown the outside with the trailer and the truck, but there's the picture here on the right. Samuel who was present at the cellar when I made this visit was the driver of the semi-trailer truck and he drove it there as well as helped for the loading of the juice, you can see him in the video, Anne jokes that he wasn't the Chef de Cave over there but the Chef Semi-Remorque... They say that not only the fermentations started in the trailer but some of them finished therre as well, making it a unique experience, I suggest Anne to print it on the label when the whole fermentation took place in the semi (not sure the wine administration like it, though...). Anne says there was also some juice for Greg, some Sauvignon for example. I visualize the truck on the highway bound for the Loire, little chance the unsuspecting motorists guess that they are passing a winery on wheels...
Anne found her labelling machine on Le Bon Coin, the online classifieds site, looking every day with the search word étiqueteuse until she found one. Before that
she used an artisanal system designed by a Japanese trainee who used a wooden box where you could lay a few bottles, wipe them clean and put the label. Now she looks for heating coil (canne chauffante) because they may need some for the winter
Here on the picture Anne fills a glass of her worrying Wonder Womanne 2008 (she says it's rather Wonder Poufiasse now...), the tank that was fermenting too fast in the bottom of the gallery and which she moved closer to the door to cool it a bit and have it calm down. Gorgeous color, red-orange, almost tile, she says this is the usual color. Usually the blend is Cinsault, Syrah and Grenache and this year it is Syrah, Grenache and a bit of Carignan, the reason there wasn't enough Cinsault, especially that she needs also some to make Pot d'Anne and Etat D'Anne. That's also because she changed the supplier, Christophe Beau (Beauthorey) who provided her the grapes, has his son Victor who is beginning to make wine himself (at Inebriati), so she found another one, the down side is he has less Carignan (but lots of other, including varieties she didn't have before). The sugar is well down from what I taste, nice juice. she used bottles with blue glass last year, this year it will be black glass.
Then Anne walks to another tank where she has her first ever white, a blend of Colombard and Vermentino, two varieties provided by her new source in the Languedoc. She picked all of them the same day because it would have been tricky to manage sepârate pickings for the two varieties (the
Colombard was riper than the Vermentino), they lacked time and the truch was full and waiting to move all the tanks to the Loire. so they vinified both juices together (and pressed them together alike), starting in the semi-trailer. they did the pressing in a facility in the languedoc as well as the setlling of the lees (débourbage) for which they has brought along a large white vat in the truck.
Right now the wine is in the middle of its malolactic (the primary fermentation is finished for a while). Tastes pretty good, she says the malolactic may be almost finished, Anne says she likes the result for a first try at a white. She was a bit anxious because she hasn't any experience in whites, plus she's not usually a fan of southern whites, she finds them often heavy. I tell her that for hzer reds she's known to make easydrinking reds with grapes grown in a region where it's difficult to do so. She says she picked at a time other people hadn't yet begun to harvest, or she was picking Carignan when other growers were picking their Cinsault. With the Vermentino part being below maturity she'll have a wine sporting a reasonable 12,7 % alcohol, not bad for the region. I like the aromatic coating feel of this wine, very promising, with this small hint of bitternes, be it related to the finishing malolactic or not.
Here Anne helps Gregory rack a fermenting vat of red into another vat, this is a blend of Gamay and Côt. Greg got mildew on his Gamay so he got insufficient volumes of it and he completed the press load with some Grolleau. The vat if now fermenting healthily, Greg says that it may not be cause by the newly painted and cleaned walls and ceiling in the cellar gallery, the yeast ambiance varies from year to year and this one is particularly vibrant. Fermentations are going pretty fast, which is good but they're almost too fast for them to follow the pace, they have a hard time following each vat and tasting everything timely.
we then go taste Anne's Cinsault, at least the free run juice or jus de goutte. This will be part of Pot d'Anne, but part of this juice will also go to Etat d'Anne. Nice turbid color, light as it
should be for a free run (picture on right).Superb nose here, quite peppery like a Pineau d'Aunis would be. Anne brings a glass to Gregory so that he can taste too. THe wine is a bit acidic because the malolactic hasn't even begun.
We also taste the press juice from the same Cinsault, the color is quite light too, Anne says that they didn't make long macerations this year (they made 4 or 5 days) because Cinsault is a bit fragile and this time it seems it didn't like the truck stage, she adds. Malolactic hasn't started yet here also. More substance here of course with pretty nice tannic feel, you just have to imagine it with a tamed acidity after malolactic is completed. She doesn't like to taste the wine at this stage between the primary and the malolactic, that's why she doesn't take part in wine tasting events at this time of the year, when winemakers are encouraged to show wines that aren't finished.
Then we tasted her Merlot, also a juice she brought here from the Languedoc. She says the last time she had the wine analyzed at the lab, the malolactic was 40 % to completion. This is a new cuvée, she hadn't made any Merlot before, same for Carignan (the vat pictured above), this is the first time she works with these varieties, so the cuvée name is still undecided. The grapes travelled in the semi as well at a maceration stage, part destemmed and part wole-clustered, this will be a try as she doesn't know the variety. As a side question I ask anne if she knows what was the weight of load in the truck on the way back to the Loire, she says 23 tons... The inside of the trailer was divided in two compartments, one for the rosés and white, maintained at 8 C (46,4 F) and the other for the reds at 17 C (62,6 F) which was almost the ambiant temperature (the goal for the reds was mostly to avoid the temperature swings between the night and the day). This year she'll probably have 7 cuvées, she'll have new cuvées but will not make Anne a Wine Again because the Syrah wasn't nice enough, she also will not make CSG and Anagramme (will come back eventually in the following vintages if she has no mildew and she gets enough Grenache).
We then taste the Carignan, also from a vat, right next from the Merlot (this is the one she pumps the floating lid of). Here also she had in the truck tanks of destemmed grapes, some with whole-clustered and some with the two modes, in order to see the difference, and here she blended the three, her impression is that Carignan fates better when destemmed. The wine tastes pretty good at this stage, I love it, Anne says that the malolactic is basically over now. She'll rack it soon to another, similar tank, in order to take away the thick lees, then she'll decide if it will bottled by itself or blended with Merlot, with bottling possibly next spring.
They can write a new part of the famous "Adventures in the wine route" with the title of "Adventures of a routed wine" 8-D
Kind regards,
Jose
Posted by: Jose | December 07, 2018 at 01:14 PM