Auxey-Duresses, Burgundy
Laurence & Nina (who wasn't present that day alas) are the two friends behind Les Flâneurs, a small négoce based in Burgundy. I first met Laurence Cuthbertson, a Brit from Welsh, at Domaine Dandelion while
visiting with Aaron, Laurence was working there then. Laurence and his partner Nina met initially in New Zealand in 2017, she had come there for the harvest as she was already working in the wine trade (in London if I understood correctly); they then on the same year travelled by bus and train to Armenia and Georgia where they did a bit of picking to experiment the harvest there, they worked for example in Georgia at Nika Marani.
In 2018 they took a trip to France, spending 2 or 3 weeks with different winemakers throughout the season, starting with Castillon-la-Bataille (near Saint-Emilion), Pic Saint Loup, Alsace, the Loire....
In 2019 they worked with a winemaker in Northern Switzerland in Schaffhausen, at Markus Ruch, very interesting guy he adds, he let them make a barrel of wine with him. And lastly in 2020 they came to Burgundy, working with various people, big domaines or also for Christian and Morgane of Dandelion, and they made 3 barrels here with the help of Jon and other people around, after which they felt confident to look for vineyards.
Laurence and Nina now run a small négoce from selected growers in the region, after they set up their own company (Les Flâneurs), which, as I asked about it, wasn't too hard to do, you just have to go ask to the accounting office for the procedure, choosing the right objet of the société [company], one wide enough so that you can do things, they'll have now for example to change this objet and this cost some money do do that. They got access to this cellar through Chris Santini, a French-American who has been on this path for quite a few years now and shares his facility with same-minded natural-wine makers, helping them start in a region where it's very hard and costly to find/rent any building fit for winemaking, even a tiny one. Many expat winemakers were thankful for Chris' help in that regard, like Jon Purcell of Vin Noé, Christian & Morgane of Dandelion and a few others like Arnaud Lopez. Santini still uses this cellar as well (the stainless-steel tanks in the background are his), so at harvest time it's pretty busy, like in a collective, a format which is pretty common in California among young winemakers.
Laurence is looking for his own place but in the region you need to be patient, be on alert and wait for the opportunity, on the other side he's very happy with sharing Chris' place. He and Nina happen to be interested with an old house they found in Saint Romain and where there's a cellar that could be used as well, so they'll see. Nina happens to work a day job there at Domaine Henri et Gilles Buisson, a large organic estate. He's also looking for having his own parcel(s), first maybe through renting one, while keeping buying for his négoce.
Asked about his production right now (which is 3 cuvées altogether) he says in 2023 they made 10 barrels of wine, sourced from many of the same parcels Chris works with in Burgundy, there's Pinot Noir planted at high elevation at the border between Maconnais and Côte Chalonnaise, then there's a blend of Marsanne he gets from Beaujolais and the rest of the Pinot Noir he gets from the Ferme d'Aubigny in Aluze (near Rully and Mercurey), a large estate which was in the past the métairie [farm] of the Abbaye de Cluny. But 10 barrels aren't really enough to make a living (maybe 10 barrels of Grand Cru would, he says with a laugh), so he needs to make more.
__ First wine we taste : Bourgogne Rouge Les Flâneurs 2020, one barrel only for this cuvée, from grapes coming from the Côte Chalonnaise. Jon of Vin Noé was buying from this place, he was usually making his cuvée Gueule d'Amour from there. While making their first wines they built their practice in terms of commercializing and building their clientèle.
the wines tasted well pretty quickly and they exported swiftly with bottles heading to Copenhagen (Lieu-Dit) and Japan... Sold out, actually in 2022 he took part to Jon's first tasting event, Haut les Mains (scroll down to 3rd pic) and it was sold out there, it could even
have been sold out 3 times that day...
Very nice mouth, a hearty red, lovely juicy Pinot. For the vinification of this tiny batch, he didn't use the cement tank but stainless with whole bunches, making some kind of pizza maceration : It's a carbo stage for 8 or 9 days and you wait for the sugar to fall to a certain point and then you foot-stomp, but not the whole of the top layer, rather on slices only, the equivalent of a 6th of the whole surface, leaving much of it untouched (I understand that doing the whole would make it easy for volatile accident to spread). Pressing came something like 20 days after the bunches were poured in. They pressed in a large basket press that was here, and because the batch was so small, they pressed over some already-pressed Saint Aubin from Jon (after fragmenting the cake). tHen the fermenting juice went in barrel until this spring. No so2, unfiltered. This year he's working with a winemaker in Meursault and he's hoping he'll sell him some grapes.
Speaking of getting their own parcel he says they were very close but it failed alas, this was about a 0.5-hectare parcel of Hautes-Côtes in Mavilly-Mandelot (where Dandelion also is) a vigneron was ready to sell them, the went to the notaire to formalize the purchase but it was blocked by the Safer, some sort of administration that regulates farmland sales and checks if already-active players are interested. The administration's initial goal is to regulate the prices and it can block a sale, even buy it itself at a price it considers correct and sell the land later to a buyer of its choice... Laurence says that an hectare of vineyards in the area is 60 000 € but someone in the Safer told him that the Safer blocks any sale over 50 000 €... So they were quite disappointed, in between they had a baby and they started making more wine, plus, until they found this house they're considering buying, they weren't sure to stay in Burgundy, they still considered the possibility to get back to Switzerland or somewhere else.
__ Aligoté 2023, from a stainless-steel tank, he says alas at the time of harvest finding barrels was difficult, parcel very close to Mâcon
Nice color. Generous and ample, I feel like some light tickling on the tongue, Laurence says it has had quite some gas but it's almost gone now. It's dry now, he found 1 gram of residual sugar 6 weeks ago. There's a light bitterness at the end of the mouth which adds a plus. He bought the juice at the source while it was being pressed and a bit of so2 was added then because the grower thought it was appropriate with the hot weather. He'll try to find a solution in the future to avoid this. The wine is lightly turbid, it may be building up graisse like we say in french, this sort of hazy flocculation that can happen in white wines. They made the equivalent of 3,5 barrels for this cuvée.
We now to the barrel cellar just behind the first room with the cement tanks and the stainless steel ones, it's a beautiful simple vaulted cellar, perfect for a quiet élevage. He has also there two barrels of rosé, 3 barrels of Pinot Noir.
__ Rosé blend : Laurence says they bought some Pinot Noir from Tournus and the grapes there on young vines were obviously not very ripe, the grower was selling the grapes for winemakers doing Crémant,
but the vines bearing a lot of fruit he could sell more and Chris was tipped about it and Laurence came along. the guy was very nice and apologetic about the big load of grapes, aknowledging he had to prune in accordance the following year. Indeed the potential alcohol was a mere 8.5 %. He made a carbo for a few days with the stems (he didn't have a destemmer anyway and after a few days he realized it didn't have a nice character with the green stems, so he pressed prematurelly, getting what ended up as a small volume of nice lunchy rosé, which he found out would fit very well when blended with his direct-press Marsanne-Roussane from the South Beaujolais which for its part was aromatic and big, and that's what we're tasting now.The color is very nice with this orange nuance.
The mouth is very enjoyable with delicate aromas, and at this temperature it's perfect (too cold would ruin this experience). Aaron points accurately that it reminds him this rosé from Provence with the Tibouren variety (he says one in particular : Les Enfants Terribles, a rosé from La Badiane), that's exactly it !
__ We now taste from anothr barrel, it's a Pinot Noir sourced from the Ferme d'Aubigny plus a little bit of Pinot he got from Chris. Laurence says he got to the point that he doesn't really want to make
many different cuvées, like parcellaires, he likes blending several wines, not only it's simpler but he enjoys more these blends like the ones Christian of Domaine Dandelion is doing. Vinification for this wine was 20 days whole-bunch in the cement tank pictured above. Because of hail damage for these grapes they were quite small (the leaves were torn off and the vines struggled to finish the process), you had these big bunches with small berries and thick skins, but at the end the character was the strongest that they had picked there, with a sappy, medicinal touch, the free run juice was crazy strong.
Some people advised him to press quickly because of this hail damage side effects but he saw that the free run juice was getting better after every day passed, so he waited, then got in barrel 16 days then pressed half the grapes, foot-stomping the rest for an extra day of maceration. Very nice nose. In the mouth & swallowed, amajestic Pinot Noir ! Length. So Good ! Very promising considering it's in its infancy.
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