Arnaud Lopez of the négoce Maison Pinot Noar [Noar in an anagram of Arno] is born in Nuits-Saint-Georges, he was initially planning to be an educator and seriously turned to the life of vigneron at the age of 35, beginning with working at Prieuré Roch
where he stayed 15 years. His grapes are sourced in organic-farmed vineyards, vinification is wholly natural with both fermentations through indigenous yeast, no filtration and no added sulfites. Actually he started making wine while very young, in 1988 : his maternal grandfather had parcels near Nuits-Saint-Georges. As a kid he played in the vineyards and helped for the harvest. His father managed a well-known restaurant in the 1980s named Le Sanglier where the top winemakers of the area would come, people like Philippe Angel, Henry-Frédéric Roch, he befriended many guys who had parcels, helping them tend the vines when he was a teenager, helping vinify in their cellar and feeling at the same time that it was a good life to have vineyards and make wine. So in 1988 [at the age of 18] he made his first wine using a wooden fermenter, he had no money for a destemmer, sulfur or sugar (sugar was routinely added then). After that he worked at Yvan Dufouleur in Nuits-Saint-Georges or at Jean-Jacques Confuron, David Duband, wineries where "modern", extracted wines were made, far from his simple, whole-bunch first cuvées, but they were friends and it was part of his experience.
And then one day, around 2005 or 2006, he drank a wine from Roch [Prieuré Roch], he still remembers the cuvée, a Côtes de Beaune Champ Perdrix, and that was a revelation and it's like he found himself back 20 years before when he was making wine at his friend's cellar... He felt that's what he wanted to make, wines like that, so he quit the job at Duband and began working at Prieuré Roch in 2007, the surface was 14 hectares and the staff were 5 or 6 people. Yannick Champ was already there (he arrived in 2003), Arnaud adds that after Henry was gone [passed away in 2018] the pillars of the domaine were Christophe and Patrick. Arnaud worked there both in the vineyard and in the cellar. In 2010 the domaine bought parcels in Ladoix and they proposed Arnaud to do the vineyard work there by himself as a contracted independent worker (tâcheron is the French word for self-employed vineyard workers) and he accepted because this format let him more free time to take care of his two children whom he's raising alone, and also to play music as he's very active besides winemaking and vineyards. He still kept helping at the vinification time as well.
Here is the vatroom which he manages to keep at 15 to 16 C (59 to 61 F) even in summer so that when the grapes are brought in (and it's often hot at harvest time) he lets them cool off here a few hours before vinification. You see all these stainless-steel tanks (pic at the top), that's because he makes many small-batch cuvées. The cement tank here were probably made by Italians in the early-to-mid 20th century, and these particular ones with a 20-hectoliter volume were intially meant for another use : These are concrete funeral vaults and as you can see on the picture below, there are premolded side supports to hold 3 coffins vertically. There was certainly at the time a high demand for this size of cement fermenters and they converted excess funeral-meant production in order to alleviate the shortage in wine containers. You only had then to put a valve at the bottom and you had this convenient narrow cement tank for intermediate volumes...
These cement tanks are perfect for temperature inertia as you know, and being originally designed for funeral use doesn't change that. Cement is easily cleaned with a high-pressure system like a Kärcher cleaner, there are no tiles inside and it's better like that. Arnaud bought all those winery tools, machines and tanks around (except for these cement tanks) when he settled in. He doesn't use the larger cement vats on the right (they make 40 hectoliters) because he prefers small size batches, the equivalent of 5 to 6 barrels, he likes to go stomp by himself with his bare feet for the pigeage and when the tank is too big you need a tool [a pigeon and he doesn't like that (and no one else than him goes into the tank, it's his thing). You can watch Arnaud working in his tanks and cellar in videos on his instagram account @arnolopez21
This facility was not where he started, in 2018 he vinified some wine in Morey-Saint-Denis, then in 2020 he made wine in the cellar of Chris Fontana, then in 2021 in the Chateau de Bligny, and then his friend Frd, caviste of Mes Bourgognes in Beaune proposed to set up a company with Arnaud and friends of his to facilitate his nascent négoce house, that's how Maison Pinot Noar was born and the structure helped him make more volume, for example this last year he made 45 barrels.
This surface facility is located in a quiet street in downtown Nuits-Saint-Georges, it's a real historic facility with cellar, you can see here the hatch that opens on the barrel cellar, it allows working totally by gravity. In the background this is the destemmer if I'm right. He was looking for years for a place to make his wine and he had been routinely passing through this street for years, seeing this particular door closed and thinking (without having visited) that would probably be a good place for him... until in 2021 while he was passing again, he saw the door opened, stopped, there were workers in there fixing the building and he learned that some guy had just bought the whole building and was planning to make appartments upstairs, he got his phone number, called him and could get a deal to rent the street level plus the vaulted cellars...
He used to get second-hand barrels from Prieuré Roch (he likes using barrels that have been through 3 or 4 wines) but now that he's making larger volumes he was obliged to buy new ones like you can see here, but he decided to blend the new-barrel wine with wine that went through one of these amphorae in order to mitigate the new oak impact. He bought a couple of them, they're Italian made (Clayver), make 250 liters and 450 liters respectively. Anf for the new barrels he buys them from a small cooperage, Francis M Tonnellerie, he says Julien Guillot (Les Vignes du Mayne) also buys all his barrels there, he likes them because they're not oak-marked. He likes the barrels of François Frères but not new ones, they're too toasted/coffee/vanilla, he can't use them before they're 2-3-wines old.
Arnaud explains that he makes cuvées of 10 hectoliters each on average, that is, 900 kg of fruit or 3 pièces (barrels), we pass thus 3 of Pinot Noir, 3 of Orphéo, 3 of Côtes de Nuits, 2 of Beaune also this year, then some Pommard, 3 of Savigny. Speaking of his bigger-volume cuvées he used 2 cement tanks for Hautes Côtes de Nuits and put that in barrels afterthen. He stores the whites in a separate barrel cellar next to this one, we pass the Blouge, a blend of Gamay and Aligoté, then a skin-contact Pinot Blanc (2 barrels), and Chardonnay (the single barrel near the lying egg). He made more Chardonnay in 2022 but it was hard to manage because the sugar stopped, volatile took off, like many of his peers there were issues in the cellar, and as he doesn't want to adds so2 he's not sure he can get this wine through. His feel with whites is that apart from skin-contact whites where it works fine, he can't do anything if something goes wrong, like he can't do pigeage to release sugar or do a remontage. For the maceration of the Pinot Blanc he waits til' 1010 or 1020 and then presses, on a fruit day of course (he takes a lot into account the fruit days, roots days and so on for his cellar work).
Back in the chai at the street level we taste the Chardonnay he considers unfit because of high vol, it was in barrels before if I'm right and blended back to this stainless-steel tank for undefinite time. Arnaud's dog is still there, always as close as possible, lovely dog and so discreet, never heard him barking. The Chardonnay is very drinkable for me otherwise, but I'm not the sharpest to detect volatile. He says he crosses his fingers hoping this improves along the following months and years...
Speaking of vineyards, in 2018 Arnaud got the opportunity to get 2,5 hectares of fermages around Pommard (in Bourgogne and Hautes-Côtes) but he didn't have at the time the company structure to handle that, so he gave the thing to a friend, Gilles Ballorin in Morey-Saint-Denis who is also vinifying nature wines, and while helping him he also made a few cuvées of his own there, that's how he began to make his own cuvées by the way. In 2019 he got some Savigny, in 2020 some other grapes elsewhere, but then in 2021 he decided to focus on négoce only because he tended to throw himself 100 % in the vineyard work and was beginning as a result to have joint pain here and there, that was not sustainable in the long term. So he just keeps helping this friend here in his contiguous parcels.
We drove near the village of Chevrey to this group of parcels he sources his grapes from, it's a block of roughly 6 hectares, including a bit more of 2 hectares of Pinot Noir, a bit more of 2 hectares of Chardonnay, plus a bit more of 1 hectare of Pinot Blanc and 1 hectare of Aligoté. The owner is a good friend of his and Arnaud gives a hand to prune and do the usual tasks there. The vineyard was abandonned for a long time then put back on tracks, so it's been free of chemicals for a really long time. Speaking of having occasionally neighbors who work conventionally, Arnaud says that that's the case for example along a parcel of Aligoté, and he doesn't use the grapes of the 4 rows next to the neighbor, he sells them, he says when you make natural wines that's what you must do. And he asks : just guess which grapes the roe deers, the badgers and the wold boars choose to eat, between the conventional parcel and his natural one ?... He says that with the last summers that were quite dry, the animals also view the grapes as a way to drink and refresh.
The place is vibrant with the breeze, the weeds on the ground and the woods and hilly landscape around. We're here among the Pinot Blanc and Aligoté, the vines are quite old, something like 80 years. Arnaud at this stage takes out the pruned canes, he says they'll be crushed. He wouldn't crush older wood which could host fungi or disease but it's ok with year-old canes, they'll return to the earth in tiny pieces and help the soil. He doesn't sow anything for the weeds, right now he says there's a bit too much of them as the soils hadn't been work for a long time. He says he loves this landscape, he lives in the next village from Chevrey, arcenant, and this is pretty much the same harmonious landscape.
You can find wines from La maison Ponot Noar in paris at Parcelles, Le Vin au Vert, Delicatessen, Le rigmarolle (also in the Marais), Les Oeillets in the 11th, Cuisine in the 9th, Les Résistants in the 10th, that's quite a good number of venues...
I'll edit this story later with tasting a few cuvées but we already had this sample made with the barrel bottoms of all the reds, it was enjoyable, a fresh chewy red with nothing added/nothing taken out...
Good Dog
Posted by: Avram Deixler | April 28, 2024 at 07:02 AM