Poiré at les Capriades

Moses at the cellar door

Faverolles-sur-Cher, Touraine (Loire)
I visited recently Pascal Potaire and Moses Gadouche at their cellar at Les Capriades, everything was quiet in the facility, this is winter, a season where you just let the wines quietly make their way through the following spring. Pascal told me that the sparkling wines had a swift fermentation last autumn, this was all very smooth and easy this year. There was nothing to see for these wines, they were all bottled and lying sur lattes or on a few riddling tables or also on riddling pallets/cages (see pic above, don't disturb them !). But the interesting thing was to talk with Pascal about their new thing (for the past 3 years), the poiré, a petnat they make from old varieties of pears. Poiré, which I think is not even well known in France is sometimes dubbed the Normandy alternative for Champagne, it is registered in an Appellation and has both mainstream producers and artisan ones. But poiré has been made for ages in other regions as well, not just Normandy.

The process of making poiré takes place at about the same time than the winemaking, just a bit after it from what I understand, because these pears are of the late ripening type. Pascal told me that this poiré production was sparked by a few encounters and their love to make local products, as they source the fruits from the same département, the Loir-et-Cher.

Bottle wall

Here these are petnat bottles, not poiré if i remember. While Pascal was telling me about what poiré is about, Moses was busy preparing a few pallets bound for New York, a shipping for Selection Massale, this will be the first time their poiré is exported there. Beautiful cellar again, going deep under the hill. Poiré is some sort of cider, just that it's made from pears, not apples, and a real traditional poiré is made from a few rare varieties that are really fit for the fermented drink.

Speaking of poiré, here at Les Capriades they began making some in 2018, and Pascal says that he met Jérôme Forget, himself a producer (Ferme de l'Yonnière) and the president of the Donfrontais Appellation in Normandy (where they make cider and poiré). Jérôme works naturally also with indigenous yeast and they talked techniques as both don't use any additive or filtration or fining, as mainstream producers for cider and poiré use all the range of correction (mechanical or chemical) used in the commercial wine industry.

In the poiré cellar

If I didn't make it clear enough for you, the 1st two pictures were made in one of the long cellar where they store the regular petnat made from grapes, and I love these old chai/cellars in the region because you have plenty of different rooms dug into the cliff, all with different size. They chose this relatively small cellar room for the Poiré, it was certainly designed to be where cellar workers would eat, gather to keep warm or possibly sleep when the wine or pressing needed overnight supervision. This is all poiré in here, from 2019 and 2020, newspaper pages separating the two vintages in the wall of bottles on the front.
You can see on the picture on the side how cozy this room must have been a century or two centuries ago, with the fireplace on the left and what was certainly an alcove with shelves to store food and drinks, the whole having been carved out of the hill's sandstone.

Checking a bottle of petnat in the main cellar

Pascal, seen here checking a bottle of regular petnat soon to be disgorged in this gyropallet (that's part of the load bound for the U.S.), says that with poiré he manages to have quite little sediments in the bottle also, but if you don't take precautionary measures you can end up having quite a few centimeters of sediments in the bottle. With the Poiré as well, it depends of the vintage as on some years you may have a push for more sediments, and you need also to keep in check the proteins. He showed me a bottle of poiré made by a mainstream producer and the sediments were something like 5 centimers thick, very impressive, and it is really excessive.

The sediment on poiré

Back in the small cellar with the wall of bottles, Pascal grabbed a magnum lying under the alcove to show me the thin sediments, this is really very minimal compared to what this could be. This poiré is one of the two cuvées of Poiré at Les Capriades, it is made with a pear variety named Poire de Loup. By the way don't think you might find such pears in your grocery store, they're really indeible because so acidic, you can't do anything with them but poiré or possibly distillate them. Even if this sedimentation is very small, Pascal says he and Moses prefer to disgorge it, in order to have people pour a drink that is not cloudy. He says that when you want to set the bar high in terms of quality it's better to avoid cloudiness, it's like when you drink/taste a wine from a barrel, you don't stirr the wine to have all the lees in the wine as well. These thin lees in the bottle are good for the élevage sur lattes but not beyond that. The poiré here remains devoid of anny additives and any so2.

He knows there's a trend in the nature movement thinking it's better not to disgorge but he backpedaled from this. Usually in other vintages he has more sediments than this, and for older vintages which stayed a long time lying in the cellar he could compare the gustative difference between a non-disgorged and a disgorged wine [not enough years of hindsight for the poiré] and the best faring was the disgorged.

On the other hand, for cuvées that are opened early it can be easy to imagine leaving the lees, it wouldn't harm the experience or make a big difference. But here at Les Capriades they want also to make older petnat wines with a very different expression than the very young petnat, and for these more serious wines, disgorging is really needed.

He and Moses wanted to set up a tasting event at Archimède in Saint Aignan at the end of 2020 with opening 10 vintages from 2008 to 2018 to show that petnat wines are serious enough to age well and show different experience with the passing years. This event couldn't be held because of the circumstances but they should do it this year probably. By the way the petnats they're selling right now go from 2015 to 2019, so they already offer a good range of vintages.

Different varieties fit for Poiré

They're working with 3 pear varieties to make poiré, the Carési, the Crassot Rouge (also spelled Crasseau) and the Poire de Loup. Pascal wants also to highlight the importance of those who pick the pears for him, beginning with Estelle Mulowsky whom you may remember from a recent story : she is also a trained draft-horse driver and works for vignerons among other things through her draft-horse company Agil Percherons. Her business is based in the north end of the Loir-et-Cher near Saint Agil (also coincidently home of a gem of natural wine event), precisely in the area where lots of pear trees of the rare variety used for Poiré can still be found standing. The fact is, these trees which were more commonly found along the country roads and along the fields a century ago (they were often planted as a natural property demarcation for a given field) were progressively cut down, especially when small fields gave way to larger fields in the industrial agriculture era encouraged by the French state.

Estelle's parents over there have a few of these pear trees on their farm, but she found more in the area (sometimes isolated in hedges or along dirt roads leading to farms) and their owners were interested to sell these fruits which they anyway didn't use anymore. Clément also is a guy who lives there and whose parents own a goat-cheese farm in Romilly, the Ferme de Bréviande, he helps them also find more forgotten pear trees, contact the owners for sale of the fruits and picking arrangements. By the way, this northern tip of the Loir-et-Cher is also very close to the Pineau d'Aunis country and Ariane Lesné of Domaine de Montrieux has also herself begun to produce Poiré, as stated in this article in a local newspaper. That's the way natural-wine makers revive this ancient tradition.

A box of pears

Here is typically a box of pears like they're being shipped to Les Capriades: It's important to say that the pears are picked on the ground, not on the tree, and they can get damage in the fall, so thyere's sorting at the chai, cutting off the damaged part so that only healthy material gets used. They've adapted on Estelle's side to see how they can limit the damage under the tree, hanging nets under the trees premptively for a soft fall and they're getting better at that.

The pears will then be mashed or crushed thinly (they bought a special tool for that) and to avoid this protein thing that builds up excessive amounts of sediments, they leave the mash rest for a certain time. You can see on the picture on the right (I took it one day I visited unannounced last fall, thinking they might still be working on their wines), it looks like a smooth paste. Unlike for winemaking tools which you can find for very cheap on the second-hand market (because there are so many wineries that close or renew their tools), they had to buy the crusher new but they're happy with it, it's a good, efficient machine. It reminds me of the very different technique I witnessed in this story to press apples and make cider, very beautiful and a lot of fun as I remember fondly...

Range of sizes and varieties

Asked when he and Moses discovered this poiré world, he says that was something like 6 or 7 years ago at a Portes Ouvertes of Hervé Villemade, there was Guillaume Foucault of Le Pertica (restaurateur in Vendôme) who told them about it as he's from this Perche region. He's selling local products in his restaurant and Pascal said that he also would like to help such a local product to breathe life again. It took years of exchange, meeting people like Estelle (who lives right in the area) before the project took shape, and for them it was certainly more easy ans sensical with their long experience in sparkling making.

Just to show me and you, here is Pascal disgorging by hand a bottle of poiré 2019, this was just their 2nd vintage of poiré and he's very proud to have managed to have very little sediment and proteins in the bottles. Because of this, there will thus will be very little wine to add after disgorgement. By law he's supposed to leave 72mm of air on the bottle neck, the reason being to avoid putting the bottle at risk to explode, the air cushion helping softening the pressure. Nowadays this requirement is less absolute because the bottles are able to sustain a very high pressure. The end products has an alcohol content between 7,1 % and 7,5 % depending of the cuvée.
For an illustrative story on a full scale disgorgement session, read this story I published a few years ago, this was when Pascal helped Noëlla disgorge a batch of her sparklings (and teaching her in the way). On such occasions Pascal wears the full gear otherwise he'd be soaked to the bone.

Last tank of poiré

Pascal at one point goes to one of the long cellars to check the density on a last tank of poiré thast still to be bottled. Like for regular petnat, poiré needs to be bottled when reaching a precise range of residual sugar level, so that fermentation continues in the bottle sur lattes, with a crown cap closure. This fermentation in the bottle will build pressure and at the end of the élevage will have also produced these lees that need to be cleared. Pascal fills a test tube to measure the sugar.

Pascal says an interesting thing about poiré, it is that it behaves very differently from a wine : while fermentation in wines tend to stall at this cold season (and would wait the rising temperatures of spring to kick back), the poiré has a vibrant energy and keeps going like a steamroller even when the temperature drops. That's one of the reason Pascal doesn't take it for granted with his petnat experience, it's slightly different and he watches carefully at every step. The temperature of the poiré is at 5 C (41 F) and he reads the sugar is now at 1034, it changed quite a bit from a week ago when it was at 1037 or 1038, you wouldn't see such a drop on a wine in a cold january.

Tasting the poiré

This was a good opportunity to taste poiré in the making : Pascal fills a glass fof this cuvée made only with one pear variety : the Poire de Loup. When finished, it will be drier than their other cuvée, which is a blend of Crasseau Rouge & Carési. At this stage, it's gently sweet but not that much, and that has to do with the other elements of the pioré, including the acidity. I love this round mouth, it's whole and balanced, I'd have it as is. Pascal gave me two bottles of (finished) poiré which I'll taste later. The Poire de Loup is a late variety, compared with the others which arrive early september (when they're also busy making wines). Pascal says that this goes typically in the farmer life of old times, the first pears to be ripe would be processed briskly because the farmers had other things to do, and the late varieties like this Poire de Loup would get more attention and care. Plus, it is less prone to volatile compared to the early varieties that can get damaged more easily. On the other hand, if you cutt out all the damaged parts from the Carési and Crasseau, they can make a great poiré as well, but historically the farmers wouldn't make the effort, they would crush the whole fruits including the rotten spots, and it would taint the reputation of the early-ripening varieties. That's one of the reasons he wants to make different cuvées respective of the varieties in order to show that even with supposedly-lesser varieties you can make a nice poiré.

Read the story on Les Capriades' Poiré by Emily

Pears hanging on tree

Comments

[chris atkins]

hi my name is chris atkins and i am curator of the first national collection of perry pears and joint curator of the other 2 national collections. I also organise the Perry Festival that takes place at the autumn three counties show every year. On our display we had 100 varieties of perry pears and 119 different bottled perries with about 35 being tasted last weekend.
we are sadly lacking in our knowledge of perry pears from our friends in europe and i wonder if you could tell me what book it is that you reference in your blog above. ISBN number would be helpful. once covid is behind us we are planning a roadtrip to visit other producers throughout europe and buy some of their perries (poiré) to introduce people in the UK to their produce. many thanks chris atkins