When I interviewed Laurent David, we were lucky enough to stay in touch and chat regularly. One day, he told me I absolutely had to meet Jean Baptiste: the captain of the Bordeaux pirates. After founding the site 750g, Jean Baptiste gave himself the chance to fulfill a childhood dream. He acquired a château (Château Cazebonne), some vines, and gave himself a mission: revealing the terroirs and grape varieties of Bordeaux. An incredible, funny, sensitive adventure that he tells us about in this episode.
So you welcome us already with a small tasting sound, the loyal listeners are getting more and more used to it.
Jean-Baptiste: We start with an Entre Amis, a Graves white, to get the mouth going. It’s a bit indulgent, it’s crunchy, it’s going to make us chatty.
I can’t wait for you to tell us the story of all this, but first can you start by introducing yourself?
Jean-Baptiste: I’m 50 today, I’ve been a winemaker for 5 years. So I’m a winemaker as a second career, after a first career where I started in wine trading in Bordeaux. I created my wine trading company and I worked on wines from around the world. Today it’s the Maison Valade-Transandine, which I created back then. I started in 1995. Those were years when we were at the dawn of the internet, the information superhighways at the time. Actually, I quickly switched to digital. I launched an e-commerce site in 1999 called 75cl.com which didn’t work because it was a bit too early. People didn’t have email yet so it was a bit complicated to buy wine on the internet. So you shouldn’t be too far ahead.
It must have been complicated to sell too, no? The payment process.
Jean-Baptiste: No, payment worked but there were no clients. There weren’t any consumers yet and there were still consumer fears about buying online. Plus, there was also logistics that wasn’t in place. Today delivering twelve bottles, that’s done. Back then you had to go through couriers and those were slightly complicated things. And then, one thing led to another, since 75cl.com wasn’t working. I launched a cooking recipe site, called 750g.com. With hard work, it worked very well. It became the second cooking recipe site in France. I sold it to a big media group in 2016. At that point, I told myself: “That’s it, I’m finally going to be able to fulfill the dream of my life, I’m going to be able to become a winemaker.” That’s how I bought Château Cazebonne and how I’ve been on this adventure for five years now with a lot of passion.
We’ll definitely come to the château, even to the story of this purchase, those are subjects that interest me a lot, but first tell us how your passion for wine came about.
Jean-Baptiste: I’m originally from Gironde. I lived in La Réole, so not very far from the estate. I have a family where we drink wine at the table but my father isn’t a great connoisseur. To say the least, the Sunday bottle. And actually, after one of the preparatory classes, I joined a business school in Lille. It’s in Lille that I discovered the passion for wine because I created the school’s oenology club, Dionysos EDHEC. And for two or three years we, with Eric Dugardin, the best sommelier in the north, vice-best sommelier of France, someone quite brilliant, we discovered the world of wine, we learned to taste and to discover terroirs. It absolutely passionned me because wine brings two universes together. It brings together a universe of the senses and an intellectual universe. It’s not only the senses, because wine is really a very intellectual subject in the approach. And it’s only when you manage to bring together knowledge of vinification, grape varieties, terroirs and an olfactory and taste approach that when you match the two, it’s absolutely magical. It’s this bridge between the senses and the intellect that, I think, resonated with me. I told myself that when I started working, I would work in wine. That’s how I created my first business in wine. I jumped right into it without knowing anything, and I created my first wine trading company.
How was it to start trading, plus you told me with foreign wines, was that in the 1990s?
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, a bit later. I started in 1995, I was in my apartment, my little SARL no money, no clients, no knowledge of wine. And I was wondering, I was vaguely making price lists on three or four references I’d found. I didn’t know how I was going to sell wine, who I was going to sell it to, or what I was going to sell. That’s when I created my company and I turn on France Inter, “Le Téléphone Sonne” at the time and there was a Téléphone Sonne about the information superhighways. And there I tell myself this is wonderful, I’m going to sell wine on the information superhighways. That’s how I started, in the night I created my website. In 1985, I was the first Bordeaux wine merchant to create a website. After a few weeks, weird people, Chinese people, contacted me saying: “I want a container of Bordeaux wine at one dollar a bottle.” I tell him that one dollar a bottle isn’t very expensive, it doesn’t work, you can’t make Bordeaux at one dollar a bottle. Then there’s a second one, and a third who ask me the same question, until I understand that for them a container of Bordeaux wine at one dollar a bottle is a container of table wine, with a brand. There, I started sourcing suppliers in the Hérault and I started packaging brands, creating brands. After that, I started exporting wine to Macau, in China like that, just to people I’d met on the internet. That’s how I started.
Incredible, I find that a fascinating story. Did you go see them in person?
Jean-Baptiste: Of course. I went to Hong Kong to meet them at the Wine Expo Hong Kong. I discovered a world of business that has nothing to do with us. My importer was a Chinese guy who was also the owner of three clinics in Hong Kong. He’d say: “I heard wine sells well in China, so I’ll try importing three containers.” A business agility, where people could switch from one job to another. A versatile business, we were in 1996 or 1997. Also a versatile business because the same importer who was buying two containers of wine from me could decide two years later to stop importing wine because it wasn’t the most lucrative and he’d found something else. That market wasn’t yet structured in the mid-1990s, but for me it allowed me to start, to start understanding the trade, understanding customs issues, handling documentary credits to get paid. That’s how I started, trying a bit to sell wine.
What were you telling yourself at that time? You must have been all alone, you didn’t have a team?
Jean-Baptiste: I was fundamentally not very good. I must have been semi-depressed and then after that, in those situations you stack small bricks. You cross small thresholds and then weeks and then months and you start finding leads. You start earning a living but it’s a fairly laborious period. I’m proud of it because it taught me a lot of things, but it’s not really a good idea to launch into wine trading without connections, without money, without a network. I think it was a bit of an impulse but I think you’re also an entrepreneur when you jump in because if you try to rationalize and ask yourself whether yes or no you can do it, actually you do nothing. I’m a great supporter of creating businesses without a business plan because the business plan is the best way to give up on your projects. Antoine: That’s funny, I have a small story. Listeners don’t really know it but during the first lockdown, I met, remotely, online, a guy named Thibaut who became my friend, who first became my associate and then my friend. We were looking to undertake something together. He has an uncle who makes wine in Romania. And we said we should set up a company together because we get along well, we have similar profiles and all, it would be fun. So we dug and we created a company that sells wine posters. As we record this podcast we’re in the middle of the Christmas season, and it’s a hit. Jean-Baptiste: I’ve seen them. Antoine: Ah, that’s possible. Jean-Baptiste: I receive emailings from time to time offering to buy these posters. Antoine: I haven’t seen you among our customers, that’s not normal. Jean-Baptiste: No, I haven’t ordered yet! Antoine: You see, that’s a company we created like that, in the middle of lockdown, remotely, without a business plan. Jean-Baptiste: I had a small wine poster sales activity, called, and is still managed, La Feuille de Vigne. We were publishing vineyard maps a bit in subway map style. Today, it’s Julie who works with us who has taken over the project on her own and who still has a small activity around it. It’s nice. Antoine: That’s quite funny then, that’s pretty cool. There are lots of different styles, subway, retro, more modern, etc. Indeed, no business plan, we don’t really know where we’re going. We know that when we sell a poster we’re roughly profitable, we don’t lose money. That’s the main thing and it’s running. Jean-Baptiste: I think it’s often like that actually. We make attempts, we try things, we see what works or doesn’t work, we debrief. Then we bounce back, we take a turn and by getting to work actually we learn lots of things.
For you was your driver business, was it being free, was it doing what you wanted, what was it?
Jean-Baptiste: Actually, I think I’m incompatible with the work world. I was fundamentally incompetent. I’d done a few internships in big companies and I told myself: “If I work in a company, these political games, these presentation games, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t want to do it.” I’d have eternally been the lowest bidder and would have been less well-regarded by my colleagues. I told myself: “I have to create a world that resembles me. I have to create a company, create an ecosystem with its rules of the game, with its values, with people I’ve chosen, with people I want to work with and that means I feel comfortable in this ecosystem.” I think the fundamental motivation is to create for myself a protective cocoon in which I feel good and in which my qualities express themselves. It’s always been my driver to do what made me happy. I’m a bit of a dilettante of business creation.
After this trading business it’s the moment you created 75cl, is that it?
Jean-Baptiste: In parallel I created 75cl with friends. After a year, a year and a half we crashed because we’d launched in two countries. Actually it was my Bordeaux stocks that served to finance the internet activities. That lasts for a while. I sold this trading activity to one of my associates, Jean-Luc Soubie who today has brilliantly taken over Valade-Transandine, and made it the leading player in importing quality wines from around the world. He imports remarkable Houses pretty much everywhere. He has done remarkable work for twenty years around Valade-Transandine. I’m very proud to see that I planted a seed and it grew well. And then at that moment, I looked for work and changed careers. I switched to internet. I worked two years in digital. In parallel I told myself since 75cl.com didn’t work I’m going to do 750g.com because we cook more often than we drink wine. I told myself that would work better.
Not for everyone, but for some.
Jean-Baptiste: Still for everyone. That’s how, in parallel in the evening I was doing my copy-pastes, I was writing cooking recipes. I remember the first year I called it the mille bornes. I told myself that by the end of the year I’d have a thousand recipes on the website. I failed, I ended up at 750 recipes. So 750g, that was still pretty good. After that, one thing led to another, we started organizing better. I started hiring someone, structuring and after that it worked well because I’d understood early. Since I’m one of the first professional generations to do internet, from 1995, I mastered all the communication mechanisms, the keys to success, SEO, emailing, marketing acquisition subjects, for a decade now social networks. All these components, those are things that are my skills today.
Yes, you got there very early. So 750g, I must have been too young to know the beginning, but today it’s something huge.
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, it’s become a very nice site with a very nice offer, with quality people who do a good job. I look at it a bit from afar but I’m also very proud of this baby.
Yes, that’s clear. It’s the same, it’s something you weren’t envisioning when you created it? You told yourself it would be fun to create a site…
Jean-Baptiste: I remember very well at the time the moment when I was doing this in the evening, my wife was telling me: “But why are you wasting your time working on stuff after ten in the evening when you have a job that earns you a living during the day?” I told her: “You’ll see, I have my job that earns me a living and bores me, but it’s the second one that will take over because that’s what passions me.” That’s also one of my atavisms, I often have two or three projects at the same time. In the end, I’m planting seeds while I have a project that’s working. It allows you not to think and the day life means we put an end to a project, we can move on to something else. We’re already launched into new adventures that passion us.
We’re meant to get along. Laurent did well to put us in touch. By the way I haven’t greeted him but thanks to Laurent David who came on another podcast episode that you can listen to. He’s the one who put us in touch.
Jean-Baptiste: We’re both neo-winemakers with somewhat singular approaches, with a fresh look. We come from elsewhere, we move lines. That’s what’s interesting, that’s what we come together on.
So tell us, you sell 750g.
Jean-Baptiste: And I start looking for a vineyard. My leitmotif is finding vines in terroirs that aren’t too high in price. I could have bought beautiful, beautiful vines. I succeeded well in selling the company, so I had the means. I had choice in terms of terroir, but actually I tell myself I have no added value on a prestigious terroir. Because, overall, why is a wine expensive? Wine is expensive because a terroir is expensive, that’s the first component of a wine’s price, it’s the price of the terroir, the price of land, and conversely. If prices go up, land goes up. It’s intimately correlated. Because in a sale price, it impacts the company’s capacity to generate value to then prepare successions, which are a leitmotif in the wine sector. I have no added value to arrive on a terroir of Pessac-Léognan, of Saint-Emilion or of Pauillac. If the bottle of wine sells for 50 euros, you have to be able to do better. My leitmotif was rather to find pretty affordable terroirs to be able to have critical size and to be able to distinguish myself, create excellent products and create added value. I think in terms of business choice, I have more added value starting from a terroir and being able to enhance the wines than trying to optimize excellence that’s already obtained by a number of players in Bordeaux, but pretty much around the world. So buying a grand cru or wines from prestigious terroirs, in the end that means managing a situation rent, managing it well, performing well, but value gaps are complicated. Since I wasn’t there to invest money, because that’s not what drives me, but I was there to build a project and write a story. I was looking for terroirs in quality appellations, appellations like Canon Fronsac, like Les Côtes, Castillon, the Graves, those appellations. With persistent searching, I was told: “Hurry up, there’s a property, there are twenty-seven hectares of vines, you mustn’t miss the opportunity.” I went to visit the vineyard and I came across a very beautiful property, with a beautiful history, that was little known but with very beautiful terroirs and vines in good condition. After that we conducted the adventure, we discussed for a few months, we closed the financing and we jumped in. I had the keys on September 5, 2016. With a winery, no equipment, no team and we had to vinify, and there it is. We found solutions and we released the first vintage. It’s a vintage in conventional. I sold everything to the trade because I wasn’t interested in commercializing it since from the start I was telling myself that what I’m doing makes sense if I go organic and biodynamic. Because I think wine is fundamentally an accessory product. I think consumers, me first as a consumer, will want to indulge themselves by drinking organic wine and being part of a responsible approach. Organic, I don’t go into it because there are pesticides, residues in the bottle, because the taste argument, the trace of pesticides in wine argument, I think it’s a bad battle horse. Anyway for me, it’s hypocrisy. If you drink wine that’s organic all year at home and then you go eat at a restaurant the next day at noon you’re not going to make sure of the traceability of the tomato that was served to you. You can’t be today in total traceability. For me, it’s not the subject. On the other hand the organic subject and what I’ve been experiencing for five years, it’s a subject of life of terroirs. It’s absolutely magical to see how soil life transforms, how when I arrived the winemaker who accompanied me had me smell the soil and told me: “Smell that.” There were mosses on the soil, the soil was compacted. We had a soil that smelled stale, moldy and he told me: “You’ll see, year after year, the soil is not going to smell the same way.” Today, five years later, it doesn’t smell of undergrowth yet, that would be my goal. That is, having complex argillo-humic complexes with real soil life. I’m not there yet, but I already have soils that are flowery. I have good smells from soils. It’s day and night. The vine returns it with grapes that progress year after year and it’s just remarkable. I’m intimately convinced that the practice we do on our soils has a huge impact on product quality. In conventional, you can release great wines because you have technologies, you have techniques, you have know-how that’s immense. Conventional doesn’t oppose soil life, because there are people in conventional who work their vines and soils very well. But I think the key that motivates is soil life, everything starts from soils. I’m certified organic. I’m going to start my fifth year organic. We’re biodynamic too. There, the Entre Amis we tasted is Demeter and organic certified.
And why biodynamics?
Jean-Baptiste: So biodynamics, I don’t have many answers to that because I’m too Cartesian to understand anything about it. It’s a path of humility, that is, I observe that I have winemakers in biodynamics, when I taste their wines, they’re among my favorite wines. As for the causal relationship and whether it’s good because it’s biodynamic, I don’t know. I think in five years of work, I don’t have the perspective today to say what’s done, because we do many things. We work with manures from a nearby breeder. We add organic matter, we enrich our soils. All this work we do on the vine, on biodiversity has an impact and we also do biodynamics. In the end that’s why biodynamics is hard to measure, it’s because you can’t isolate one parameter from others. And then why am I biodynamic, I’m also biodynamic because organic isn’t, for me, a sufficient set of specifications in terms of requirements. That is, organic is a minimum to practice and in the end the label that encompasses the most viticulturists in love with their soils, their terroirs, their environment is for me biodynamics. That’s where you find many great winemakers. It’s a kind of community in which I find there’s the most homogeneity in the approach, the approach to wine, to terroirs, to passion for the product. We’re above all enthusiasts who want to achieve a result on the product. And we don’t produce a raw material, we don’t produce grapes the way we produce wheat. That’s where I find myself most at ease. I’d like biodynamics to be more documented, where more proof is brought. Because maybe in biodynamics there are perhaps things that don’t work and that we can’t isolate. We observe things, for example, the 500P have an obvious sourdough effect on soil life because we bring bacterial life to it and we enrich the complexity of the soil. I’m convinced of it. The silicas also have their effect on foliage and on light. So do the 502, 504, 506 have an effect? I just appeal to humility to neither affirm it’s wonderful, nor stop because I don’t understand anything about it. I observe that and I conduct that with a lot of observation and desire to learn.
My personal conviction is that, in biodynamics, as you said a bit, you do things that are good for the soil, for the vine. You do something good and at worst nothing happens but you’ll have done something good.
Jean-Baptiste: I think a number of elements come down to a green thumb. Why are there people who have green thumbs? Because they love their plants and they take care of them. They’re sensitive, they observe. They do a number of micro actions that have an impact. And probably also the biodynamic preparations, the herbal teas. It’s obvious that when we dynamize our treatments with copper, with herbal teas, on horsetail, on oak bark… A number of herbal teas have obvious impacts that can be explained. Or a nettle slurry on the plant’s relationship to nitrogen, things like that. These are grandmother’s remedies that make sense. By the way some are sold commercially today. They’re picked up by industrialists who commercialize these solutions.
That’s clear. All these sums of micro actions, these little habits, it’s something that, in the end, has a cumulative effect that’s huge. Tell us a bit about this wine that we have in our glass that’s making us talk and that’s delighting us.
Jean-Baptiste: It’s a paradox. I set up in Bordeaux, when it was the wine I no longer drank. That is, I was a Bordeaux enthusiast in the 2000s. For a few years I have Bordeaux in my cellar and I tend not to open it because I’m a wine enthusiast and I drink everything. I love the Jura, I love the Loire, I love the northern Rhône, the beautiful Syrahs. I obviously also love wines from around the world due to my journey and what I’ve done. I find there are wonderful things pretty much everywhere in the world. I sort of set up in Bordeaux through a winemaker encounter and an opportunity effect. It turns out I found myself, I don’t know if it’s coincidence, fifteen kilometers from where my parents lived. They still lived there when I set up. I told myself it’s nice, when I come back to Bordeaux I’ll stay with my parents. It’ll allow me to see them and then I’ll go work in the vines. I set up in Bordeaux, and so I arrive with a number of ideas about analyzing Bordeaux wine. Overall why I don’t like it. Let’s say it’s not one of my favorite wines.
I hope you know that will be the title of the episode? Jean-Baptiste Duquesne, why I don’t like Bordeaux wine?
Jean-Baptiste: I don’t like it because Bordeaux made choices. Overall, in those big properties that pulled the image of Bordeaux, they made choices to make wines for aging. You can value a wine in Bordeaux if it ages, if it ages a long time. That means it imposes having wines with extractions, with matter, with wood to create structures. We end up having, on the grands crus, a wine whose paradox is: I’m selling a bottle that’s not pleasant to drink by the consumer today at time T, and that’s more an iconic object that you’re going to keep in your wine cellar and drink long term. So on red wine, I find we’re in total mismatch with what I am as a consumer, as an executive, in mismatch with my senior executive friends who don’t drink Bordeaux anymore either because people have less and less cellar. They go to the wine merchant and say: “What do you have to recommend for tonight.” “Well I recommend this Ploussart which is fabulous, you’ll see, fruit.” Then the next day they tell him: “Here this Saumur Champigny, you’ll see,” and then the next day: “It’s a Crozes-Hermitage.” And those wines and those regions have marketed products to respond to consumer expectations who want to indulge themselves. And Bordeaux is therefore not in the proposal scale of consumer expectations in those red Bordeaux. Paradoxically on white Bordeaux, Bordeaux took another stance which is to make white wines on freshness, on aromatics. So fairly tioled, sauvignonné wines, in the end boring wines, I mean small oyster wines, that bores me, but fundamentally. I don’t want to drink a second glass. I arrive in Bordeaux taking the total opposite stance on this, because I want to make Bordeaux wines that I want to drink. Overall, I work white wines more on maturity, on color. What we tasted, we put in a transparent bottle because I assume this almost “gold” color on this dry white wine. People tell me: “But it’s sweet.” No, it’s dry, you’ll see. I rather make terroir wines by working maturity, by pushing and looking for matter, looking for bitterness on white wine. So I do the opposite of red wines where I really don’t want extraction. I, I want freshness, drinkability. I want to indulge myself. I’m going to make Bordeaux that are rather Loire-like in approach and that, that structures my range. I have today three ranges. I have an “Entre Amis” range, which are vat wines. A “Le Grand Vin” range where there, I’ll work the exercise of grand vin in the Bordeaux style with wood, less wooded than Bordeaux, you’ll have understood, both in white wine and red where I’ll try to find freshness, balance behind a wood that will be discreet, that will bring complexity. I work parcel-by-parcel rather in a Burgundian culture where I’ll isolate terroirs. Because when I realize that on merlot lots between my parcels, I have fifteen days to three weeks difference in maturity, those aren’t the same terroirs. I don’t have a lot that tastes the same and I want to isolate lots to show that in Bordeaux we also have a palette of terroirs that’s in the end more complex, broader than what you find in Burgundy for example. Because in Bordeaux we’ll find on the same property clays, limestones, gravels, silts, parcels oriented north, oriented south. We’re going to have an absolutely magical palette of terroirs in the geology, in our Bordeaux properties. Bordeaux from these terroirs decided on a brand strategy, a blending strategy. That made the success of Bordeaux, I don’t deny that. It was a strategy of blending, of finding excellence through blending but as a result we standardized taste. And me, what interests me, is having people taste how lots in the end have very different identities, particularities from each other. And how in the end in tasting you can have a blast, one day taste a merlot on deep gravels and the next day rather a merlot on silt. I have a parcel where there are limestones with Asteries, the Saint-Emilion limestones with Asteries that surface between one and three meters deep and I have gravels and behind and below, I have limestones with Asteries and we find the terroir. We find the limestone on this merlot, we find the very chalky finishes with quite robust tannins, with structure whereas I wouldn’t have that at all on another terroir, on gravels. So that, that passions me. It passions me to revisit the Bordeaux terroir with this parcel approach which is complicated because if I pushed the legal aspect, fundamentally in the Bordeaux appellations, I don’t have the right. European regulations say we have the right to mention parcels from which wine could be made to sell AOCs provided the AOCs allow it. It’s not a Bordeaux specificity, it’s not a claim. On these subjects, I’m completely against the customs because I’m not conformist and I want to indulge myself. There we talked about the three ranges. The fourth range is the forgotten grape varieties range, which is the big subject that passions me. When I arrived, the first question I asked was: “Formerly, what was in the vines?”, and the answers didn’t satisfy me. Because they answered me: “No, it’s always been merlot, cabernet sauvignon, as far back as I remember, my grandfather had all that.” Others were telling me that if these grape varieties were forgotten it’s because they weren’t good. That, I find a completely stupid answer. How can you say that about something you don’t know. It’s absolute stereotype, it’s idiotic. That annoyed me and so, I’ve been searching for five years for all the books written about wines of Bordeaux. I’ve found more than a hundred works. I peel through them one by one. I unearth, month by month, new grape varieties. I have proof they existed in Bordeaux. Ampelography is complicated because there are many names. The same grape variety could have one, two, three, four, five names depending on the terroirs. For example the Bouchalès which I replanted was called Prolongeau in the Blayais, Gros de Judith in Pessac and Léognan and was rather in my region the Grapu. So this grape variety, which I find under different names in the literature, well I have to make the link with the Bouchalès which is the current ampelographic name. I found 57 grape varieties and I have proof they existed in Bordeaux. I started the work of replanting them one by one. I don’t want to believe the winemaker in 1900 who was planting these varieties was an idiot. It’s not acceptable to tell yourself that a winemaker in 1900 who was planting one of these varieties planted something bad. It’s not true. The 1900 winemaker is like us, he wants to produce a grape to earn his living with. If it wasn’t good, he wouldn’t have planted it, it would have already disappeared long ago. This winemaker had reasons. It’s this quest I opened which is to rediscover why a winemaker was planting a grape variety in 1900. That means on what terroir, he wasn’t planting it just anywhere. And then what were his reasons. I’ll take an example: I replanted some jurançon noir, which is a grape variety that was very widespread in the southwest pretty much everywhere in Bordeaux. It had lots of names. It was called the enragea, the enragé, the gros noir, the grand noir. This grape variety, I vinified it for the first vintage in 2020. It wasn’t great. It makes slightly fruity grapes, it’s easy. There’s a moderate tannic structure, it’s light. Why not for making rosé, but I didn’t have a great favorite compared to others I planted that are sublime. And then this year, we had a complicated year because it froze violently. In southern Gironde, we had temperatures that dropped to minus seven degrees during the freezing nights. I lost ninety-five percent of my harvest this year, and the jurançon noir set off again. It gave me thirty hectos of yield and it didn’t get mildew. It was a year very loaded with mildew. It ended with magnificent foliage, magnificent vigor and I actually understood it was the perfect grape variety of the winemaker. A grape variety that produced every year, a beautiful harvest, regular, homogeneous. It’s a brilliant grape variety. When I see that I tell myself that all the same, we’re dumb. We set up merlot which, as soon as conditions are difficult, goes to mildew and it’s a horror. You have to treat if you want to harvest. And behind, we had in our panoply a grape variety like jurançon noir that makes charming wines, fruit wines that would be magnificent for making Bordeaux Supérieurs, entry level, for making fruit wines, pleasure wines, wines that the consumer asks for. The consumer today reproaches Bordeaux for being too tannic. Behind we try to play with tannic varieties like merlot and we tear our hair out making light wines from grape varieties that aren’t made for that. And behind we had in our panoply a number of grape varieties that could have responded to market marketing needs and that we set aside. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for five years. I wrote a book. I just published it, it comes out next week, December 14. “Bordeaux, une histoire de cépages” [Bordeaux, a history of grape varieties]. It was actually to try to understand how winemakers reasoned, what crises they faced and why in the context of these crises they were brought to change grape varieties. So the oidium crisis, the mildew crisis, phylloxera, the unsold sales crises, the wars, the freeze of fifty-six… All that had huge impacts on the geography of vineyards. All this work was bringing hypotheses, bringing proof, pieces to write a story that’s my interpretation but that seems to me consistent with what’s plausible and that must have happened in our heads, in the winemaker’s head in all these eras. Antoine: It’s a subject that passions me, these forgotten grape varieties, or these rare grape varieties. What drives me crazy is that you have a diversity that progressively crumbles. There’s less and less variety diversity. As you said about jurançon noir, you potentially have solutions to contemporary problems found in grape varieties that we’re nonetheless setting aside. Manseng noir for example. It’s a grape variety that’s very late today, that produces very few degrees of alcohol. For a long time, we told ourselves it wasn’t worth harvesting because anyway, we’re not going to make wine with that since it doesn’t produce enough alcohol, and actually today it’s perfect. Jean-Baptiste: The magnificent work that Plaimont does. I went to the modest grape variety meetings, I was at the table with Plaimont. We debated it a lot. And of course, it’s fascinating to dive back into that. We have an exceptional genetic heritage. We still have to come back to the basics, that is, the big game changer of the wine market was phylloxera. It changed the rules of the game with the rootstock. That is, with the rootstock, that’s not said in the vineyard because the winemaker’s pontiff is: “I choose terroirs adapted to my soils. Merlot, cabernet, sauvignon do well left bank, right bank.” There’s a whole literature around that, that’s quite bullshit. Let me explain: today what has to be in alignment with the terroir is the rootstock above all. And the rootstock had a huge impact. It allowed reducing grape variety diversity. From the moment I had a rootstock that was adapted to any soil I could carry the Bordeaux varieties wherever I wanted. When you go back to the nineteenth century, there was no cabernet sauvignon in the Entre-deux-Mers, or very little, because it didn’t work. On the clays and on the humidity, cabernet sauvignon was affected by diseases, it resisted humidity poorly and died. From the moment there’s the rootstock, it allowed simplifying. Actually, the twentieth-century history of grape variety simplification is above all one of the consequences of phylloxera. If I place myself before phylloxera, I was forced to find the grape variety that resisted humidity, dry soil well and so I was forced to have a palette of grape varieties at my disposal to respond to it.
You talk about rootstock. Today, you’re not on free-standing roots?
Jean-Baptiste: No, I’m not on free-standing roots today because I still have too much clay. I might have one or two parcels on which I could do tests. I haven’t taken the decision yet. It’s possible I’ll go for it but it’s not yet decided.
Got it. What are you having us taste here? It’s absolutely incredible. So I see vin de lieu, so a parcel wine, because so we’re in your parcel work that you mentioned.
Jean-Baptiste: Of course. There we’re on the terroirs of the Cazebonne parcel. That, that’s part of the things I question. That is, making wine is a decision tree. Actually, you can decide to do work in the vine, you have lots of possibilities. You can decide the harvest date and then once you have the harvest you can decide oenologically to do things, to put sulfur, not to put any, you can macerate cold, you can press, not press, you can put yeast or not put yeast. This decision tree means there are lots of possibilities to make wine. That is, today, summarizing the specificity of an appellation to a unique taste, it’s absurd, because given this decision tree I can make lots of wines. My way of building products is that I consider nothing is forbidden to me. Nothing is forbidden to me, that is, if in Italy they made Ripasso by taking back and re-vinifying on marc, I want to try. If in the Jura they made oxidative, I want to make some.
You make some today?
Jean-Baptiste: I have a sémillon cuvée in oxidative that’s currently aging because actually all that is cultural. They try to explain to us in wine mythology that oxidative is only possible in the Jura or in Jerez, it’s not true. There are lots of grape varieties that can work in oxidative and do wonderful things. Actually those are only blockages the winemaker has in a non-capacity to explore new paths with always behind the fear of AOC sanction. The fear of going off the rails because the AOC is a bit of a commercialization sesame. If I have an AOC, I have a number of markets that are open to me. If I want to sell my wine to Carrefour without AOC, it’s complicated. It’s complicated to sell a hundred thousand bottles of vin de France to Carrefour explaining that it’s a quality product because there’s no one to accompany it. The consumer doesn’t know the label and isn’t going to understand why a vin de France is worth fourteen euros a bottle. That means the AOC is essential. So the AOC, the winemaker is afraid of it. There we taste a vin de France. What I did isn’t conventional through the appellation, it’s the idea of asking myself why we wouldn’t make a white wine the way we make a red wine. With contact, maceration, skin maceration, on a harvest of eighty percent sémillon, twenty percent sauvignon gris. We did twelve days of fermentation in contact with the berries. We tasted every day and as soon as it tipped we said: “Stop, that’s it, there we’re good for bitterness.” I don’t want to make an orange. Because orange is still a very particular product, lots of bitterness. I want to stay on the white wine register but bring complexity to it. That’s the exercise we did on this parcel-by-parcel, the Galets de Cazebonne, from a terroir on which we worked a very beautiful sémillon lot that we hand-harvested and that we vinified this way.
I find this ultra surprising and really incredible in terms of taste. I’m enjoying myself, it’s part of the wines that make me salivate.
Jean-Baptiste: Blind, you can’t know it’s a Bordeaux. But it’s good and we want to drink it. That’s the most important thing, that is, the AOC was an extraordinary driver for winemakers. It pushed people until the seventies, eighties. It allowed eliminating lots of bad wines, it did a wonderful job of accompaniment, demand, specifications. It did a wonderful job the AOC but today, it’s something that averages out. We do this, if I present it to the AOC, they refuse it. They’ll tell me: “Your wine isn’t compliant with the appellation standards.” We have a certain impossibility to make good products that aren’t in the standard. I play with these rules. I won’t hesitate to step out, if I want to make a cuvée and I think it’s good and I want to drink it. If I want to drink it, there will be consumers who’ll understand my intention. But on the other hand, you have to be demanding. Mediocrity isn’t possible. Everything has to be good, very good. You have to make good wine, I’m uncompromising on that. If we have a problem, we have to rework. It’s not possible to commercialize something mediocre.
I think it’s sometimes been the case for some people to want to be original at all costs and not focus on taste, on what’s the product. But there it’s not the case and that’s pleasing.
Jean-Baptiste: That’s it. I don’t want it to be an experimental wine. The criterion of all the wines I put in my range is that I want us to want to finish the bottle. I mean we drink a glass and we want to drink a second one, that’s a good wine. It’s not the wine where we marvel and then at the end of the meal, the bottle isn’t finished. We bring it out, we uncork it, we’re with friends and then we don’t realize. By the way I notice you’ve helped yourselves again.
That’s what I was going to say. We didn’t do it on purpose, while you were explaining we helped ourselves to another glass. So, that means it works. On this parcel-by-parcel you were just talking about, you started this work of delimiting parcels. Is that finished, did you manage to delimit the parcels?
Jean-Baptiste: No, because where this wine comes from I did five harvests. Today I’m starting roughly to delimit well what ripens before, in what order to take them, to have clear ideas on the hierarchy of the terroir, but I have a colossal job. There are probably in there islands I haven’t identified. When you do a row, for example on the Cazebonne parcel, typically on the gravels, on this parcel, the row is three hundred meters with an alley in the middle. Between the bottom and the top of the parcel, it doesn’t taste the same. That is, in the bottom of the parcel the grapes are greener, they’re not ripe and even at the top of the parcel, on the mound, on the crest, that’s where this wine comes from, there are fifteen hundred vines that are just incredible on this terroir. I’d have to delimit in a parcel, independently of rows, islands I just harvested before and say we start at a third of the row, we do the top of the parcel, we finish this part and we’ll come back to the bottom after. You have to reach this fineness that we don’t always have. We don’t always have the logistics and we don’t always have harvests that allow us. So, we’ve had climatic incidents in recent years that have been very hard for winemakers and when you have five hectos of yield on a parcel you can’t do lacework. There’s a moment when you have to go get everything because you have to fill a barrel, you have to fill a vat, an amphora. We’re in trades of arbitration, of compromise, we have an intention but we don’t always manage to achieve what we wish.
You’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time so you know that’s part of the job. There’s something I really like in this interview and in you, it’s that I could ask you the question that you must not have made friends, that it must be hard sometimes, and I think that’s the case.
Jean-Baptiste: I’m not even sure. Of course, there are always idiots, there’s nothing we can do about that. I’m not visionary, but I think I’m arriving at a time when everything is changing. Organic enters the customs of winemakers. They realize consumption is changing. I think I’m opening paths and that it’s practical that the neighbor opens the path because I’m the one taking risks. I’m the one doing stupid things, taking bad decisions. I’m on good terms with my neighbor, we discuss, he comes to see me. When I arrived, no one was doing cover crops. Today I must have half my neighbors doing cover crops five years later. I think it’s emulation. The fact that I work on these forgotten grape varieties, I think there are many owners who tell themselves hey it’s interesting because this work hasn’t been done today by our institutions. That is, the research work hasn’t been done by the institutions that represent Bordeaux wine. They didn’t do this work on heritage research. In the end, if I do the analyses on fifty-seven grape varieties, and I draw lessons from them as a winemaker, it’s knowledge we’re going to collect that will benefit the community. I don’t do that in a closed approach either. I don’t want to hide this information. At the limit if I find that there’s a grape variety that really has its place, if we’re five hundred winemakers planting it that’s when it’ll have its market share because together we’ll create its notoriety. Alone I won’t manage to promote manseng, castets, cabernet goudable or blanc auba. Antoine: Quite a few people say Bordeaux is dead. It’s not entirely true and it’s not even true at all in some places. Lots of people are trying to do things, conduct experiments, and that’s incredible actually. Jean-Baptiste: Of course, it moves very fast, Bordeaux. Antoine: We met Loïc Pasquet who you must know. You two must be good buddies? Jean-Baptiste: I know Loïc well. Antoine: We send him a hug, he listens to us sometimes. Jean-Baptiste: So, I don’t have at all the same strategy. Antoine: No not at all, that’s quite funny actually. Jean-Baptiste: What Loïc does, that would piss me off. Selling wine to billionaires that I wouldn’t want to drink it’s so expensive, that bores me. I make wine so my buddies can drink it. That’s what gives me pleasure. I want my wines to be accessible. I’m not here to make a product, he won’t hold it against me, make a speculative product to please a billionaire who wants to pay three thousand euros or five thousand euros for a bottle of wine. This billionaire bores me, I don’t want to spend the evening with him, this guy isn’t necessarily fascinating. Each one finds their story. On the other hand, what Loïc did is brilliant. He’s a marketing genius, he opened paths. He understood lots of things, he has business instinct and an understanding of consumer expectations that’s fabulous. What he does around free-standing roots is extraordinary. Antoine: That’s clear. We send him a hug, he listens to us sometimes, I’m going to send him this episode. I’m sure he’ll listen to it. We exchange together sometimes. Each time he tells me: “You should interview so-and-so, or so-and-so.” He’s always very cool and it would please me to see him again. In our next visits to Bordeaux, we have to go say a little hi to him. You were talking about parcel work. He has a big Burgundian culture. I think it’s also his Burgundian inspirations to try to delimit parcels, understand soils, actually. As you said, it’s something that’s been little done in Bordeaux. Jean-Baptiste: No, he makes a Bordeaux wine since he makes a blended wine. We have to tell him: “Loïc, you’re bullshitting us. You ape the Bordelais and you sell it more expensive since the Burgundians sell more expensive than the Bordelais.” But in the end, no, Loïc doesn’t make terroir wines because he blends. Antoine: I think he’s preparing parcel-by-parcels. We have to be careful. Jean-Baptiste: I think he’s smart enough to question himself and to listen to me.
For you, your mission today, is it in Bordeaux? I have the impression you’ve been enjoying yourself for five years. Is that what you want to do forever?
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, it’s a subject that passions me. After that I have several ideas a minute, you’ve understood. I still have a nice little startup there that we’ve been developing for a year. We’re going to Las Vegas to promote our technology at CES. I still have other things in the pipeline that passion me.
What is it, this company?
Jean-Baptiste: It’s a technology called Brandeploy which is a content management technology for big companies to improve content distribution overflow. It’s a bit technical, we won’t talk about it.
There’s Jean-Baptiste’s brother who just walked by. We could have asked him a question, by the way. How were you when you were young?
Jean-Baptiste: Better not ask him the question because Damien is too talkative. He’s a chef, so he participated in the 750g adventure with me. He’s a bit the chef, the emblematic figure of the 750g site. We built the site with complementarity. I embody someone who masters marketing and the technical tools of the internet and Damien embodied the meaning in the 750g project. I think we don’t make projects if there isn’t real meaning and at the same time real technicality. Our success is that Damien embodied competence in the kitchen, with Christophe who’s the other chef, who have this competence and me who had the technicality to be able to create growth. Today, I have the same problem in the vineyard. That is, you don’t run a vineyard if you don’t have technicality with teams. I have a wonderful team of people who are winemakers.
You mention them by the way on your labels, I found that super cool.
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, but I think it’s important. All the first names of the people who created a cuvée are on my labels because I owe a lot to Bruno, to Kevin, to David, to Aurélien. They’re the ones who make the wine in the end. They’re the ones who do the job all year, who go remove the thistle under the foot in July when it starts to get very hot before it goes to seed, they’re the ones who do this job. Otherwise it would become madness. If you let it go, in two or three years everything spirals out and it becomes a wild vine that no longer produces grapes. You need technicality, but at the same time you need meaning because in the end the public has to buy in. People have to buy the wine. I think we buy wine not just because it’s good, that’s a prerequisite, but we buy a story. I’m a storyteller. By the way I don’t know if I’m telling you about what I’m preparing for January?
It’ll come out after January, so go for it.
Jean-Baptiste: I think my profession is telling a story. You see it in my cuvées. Behind each label I tell the cuvée exactly as it is, because there’s nothing that pisses me off more than having a bottle I bought ten years ago and not knowing anymore what I bought. Ten years later you don’t remember anymore. You went to the winemaker, you bought eight cuvées from him, but you don’t remember anymore his cuvée number seven, what was in the bottle. Then, you don’t even remember what price you paid for the bottle, whether it was the small wine at fifteen bucks or the great cuvée at forty-five euros. And then, you end up opening the forty-five euro bottle with your buddies thinking it’s for aperitif, the Friday night sausage. After that you look and you say: “Ah well yes, I opened you something good.” Me, I tell stories. In the logic of telling stories, I told myself it would be good to have them told by an artist. I found a rapper who’s going to interpret each cuvée for me. I’m going to put a QR code behind each bottle and we’ll see a clip of the rapper telling each bottle. I think we have to explore even more new paths. The winemaker has to understand that today they’re no longer the producer of a product. We’re here to provide pleasure to the consumer, to provoke an emotion and so that’s my intention, my profession. It’s sharing this passion with people who give me the pleasure of tasting my wines, of publishing them on social networks, of sending me comments. I respond to everyone. You can contact me on Instagram, I respond to everyone. It’s very rich, it’s fascinating to discuss with your final consumer who went through an importer or a wine merchant. I mean we’re in an era that’s never been seen. We have a possibility, we, as winemakers, to take back contact with the consumer. Which, in the history of wine, wasn’t possible.
I’ll even tell you, all companies have the possibility to talk with the consumer and each person has the power to do it. Actually, my hairdresser would have the possibility to talk with all the people in my arrondissement in Paris to offer them a haircut. Each winemaker has the possibility to talk with all the people who consume wine.
Jean-Baptiste: Exactly. I’ve been in digital for over twenty years and I’ve understood it well. And I’m making one of the first digital wine brands in Bordeaux in my way of approaching the product, in my way of approaching taste, in my way of approaching the range. So I think I’m in line with the times. Today, we have this duty. It’s complicated because being a winemaker is being in the vines, discussing with your banker, invoicing, shipping, doing customs papers and getting the dough back when the restaurateur hasn’t paid, doing your packaging, shipping bottles and making wine too, you mustn’t forget. I’ve never seen a job as complete as winemaker. It’s extraordinary. Actually winemakers are supermen. When I launched into this I thought it was easy, like other professions. No, it’s ten times more complicated to be a winemaker than all the jobs I’ve done so far.
We talk a lot about mental load, especially in entrepreneurship. I think you being a winemaker it’s the same thing but exponentially. You always have to look at the weather for example. And it’s such a simple thing. You see today I have mental load, but the weather doesn’t preoccupy me at all, it’s really the last thing that preoccupies me.
Jean-Baptiste: It’s a problem because we can’t do anything about it. It’s a bit dumb to look at the weather but freezing nights, that prevents me from sleeping. Every hour I wake up and I turn my phone back on to know what temperature it is in the vines. Now since we have technologies and we measure everything, it’s abominable. It’s torture. Antoine: You should set up a notification system to wake you up. Jean-Baptiste: Ah, that’s the worst. I don’t like notifications because at least I can sleep at least two hours. If I set up the notif, oulala. Antoine: If you say to wake you up when it’s below zero like that, you sleep the rest of the time. Jean-Baptiste: We can’t do anything about it, actually. All the work was done upstream. There are strategies to cover, but we can’t do anything. We’re nothing compared to nature, we’re not much. Antoine: You talked about it just a little, but let’s try to deepen what this adventure was, you told us you trace the history of grape varieties in Bordeaux but you also told us this book took you five years to write? Jean-Baptiste: No, it didn’t take me five years. It took me five days to write. Antoine: That’s not the same story. Jean-Baptiste: But it’s because I’d accumulated pieces for five years, and I knew where to look for them.
You knew you were going to make a book, or not? It was for you?
Jean-Baptiste: I needed to recover documents, classify them. I wanted to redo the matrix of all these grape varieties. I needed to understand and bring the pieces together, cross literature, find my Rosetta stones. That is, find the documents in literature that allowed me to bring together the Prolongeau and the Gros de Judith. From the moment I found the Rosetta stone of an author in 1930 who tells me: “The Prolongeau and the Gros de Judith, it’s the same thing,” I have my piece that allows me to go back up and redo my thread. At the start I didn’t know, I had zero grape variety. All these documents I accumulated, it’s a bit what’s in the book with another dimension that was trying to understand and slip into the psychology of the winemaker by saying: “Why did the winemaker change grape variety?” I had elements of response. I found in historians’ books interesting elements of response. Actually, it’s quite simple. If you put yourself back in the position of the winemaker in 1850 in Bordeaux, there are two hundred thousand winemakers for a vineyard that’s barely larger in number of hectares than current vineyards. That means a winemaker has less than a hectare on average. At that moment, in 1851 in Bordeaux in the Graves arrives the oidium crisis. It makes them lose three quarters of the harvests in Bordeaux until 1855, roughly. In the psychology of this winemaker who is completely powerless, no science, no media to inform. Today, we’re capable of inventing a vaccine in less than twelve months. At the time we didn’t even know what was happening. They take five, six, seven years before finding solutions to finally understand that sulfur is a solution, but we take several years. And from the moment we know, we still have to be able to buy sulfur to be able to spray it, sulfur powder. We also have to invent a machine to spray sulfur in an industry that’s stammering. So, it costs very expensive. When you’re a winemaker in 1851 and you have half a hectare of vines and for five years you do nothing, what do you do? You uproot your vine and either you don’t replant any, or you replant a grape variety that has lower sensitivity to oidium. That’s where the Entre-deux-Mers tips over to Folle Blanche. Everything tips over in Entre-deux-Mers because Folle Blanche is resistant to oidium. That’s how little by little through crises, winemakers had to adapt. They had to change their decisions because they had a total inability. After that, I have about an hour to roll out this story.
After that you’ll have to read the book.
Jean-Baptiste: It’s fascinating. We’ll do another podcast just for this story because all these crises actually posed problems for winemakers who had to earn their living. The winemaker chooses a grape variety because he thinks he can earn his living with it, that’s his driver. The grape varieties that were chosen in Bordeaux today, in the end, are the grape varieties of the rich. They’re the grape varieties of those who had the means to fight against disease. They’re the grape varieties of the Haut-Médoc and Sauternes. And when the choices arrived we chose the grape varieties of the left bank because those people had the means to produce great wines and resist diseases even though these grape varieties, cabernet sauvignon typically, has a sensitivity to oidium but the Médoc people didn’t want to give up cabernet sauvignon. It became the norm because they managed to make them survive but you have to read Marc-André Selosse’s writings on what happens on the plant and on resistance. He writes fascinating things. Actually, the vine shouldn’t have survived this crisis. Today, we have a vineyard because we persisted. We decided to make the vine survive. Antoine: It’s a story that’s incredible and that’s endless. I think even for you it must have been hard to finish this book. Jean-Baptiste: It’s not finished because on fifty-seven grape varieties, I’m going to have to share my experience as a winemaker for each grape variety. That’s the finality.
There’s a second edition.
Jean-Baptiste: The finality is the explanation of each grape variety. Whether yes or no, it has interest and why for a winemaker today. That’s what I’m looking for, it’s being able to say: “Yes, it has interest if you want to make this type of wine, if you’re looking for that, if you don’t want to freeze, if you have years of drought.” So it’s all this story and it’s complicated because it’s multifactorial. There won’t be a perfect grape variety. Grape varieties will never check all the boxes. We’ll have to prioritize and the winemaker will have to make choices to define which grape variety represents a future for him. Antoine: It’s already been an hour ten that we’ve been chatting together and I think we could go for another hour or hour fifteen. Jean-Baptiste: There’s material, yes.
Even several days even. We’ll do special episodes together in the future, I have no doubt. Today so you share your life between Paris and Bordeaux?
Jean-Baptiste: That’s it. I go down every week to put my feet in the vines, to go meet partners, customers, winemakers, to live and meet because everything is a question of meetings. My profession is meeting people and weaving links. That’s what will make my story have meaning. Antoine: Yes, I agree. Anyway wine is a product that’s so much in sharing and exchange that you can’t do otherwise. Your book is called: “Bordeaux, une histoire de cépages.” Can we find it everywhere? Jean-Baptiste: Everywhere in bookstores. It was published by Éditions BBD which distributes through classic bookstore distribution.
We wish you success in any case. If you had the opportunity to cross paths with yourself at the moment you launch 75cl, and slip a little word to yourself at that moment, what would you tell yourself?
Jean-Baptiste: Go for it. That, I think I’d understood. Throw yourself in the water, because it’s only by throwing yourself in the water that you fail and you bounce back and you find something. And then, in critique, I think I was too shy and too alone. That is, I tried to reinvent things alone. I tried to trace my path and forge my experience and learn from my experiences. Actually, that’s stupid. You have to go meet others. All the stupid things, people have already done them and you can avoid ninety percent of stupid things if you go meet people. I didn’t know how to do it when I was young because I didn’t necessarily have confidence in myself. I didn’t feel legitimate to go meet others, so I rewrote pages alone. Today, I’ve matured. I no longer have this defect and I know how to go meet others. So I learn faster, I progress faster, I question myself faster. I think I’m better in my skin, I’m more fulfilled and you can feel it in my projects.
Do you have a wine book to recommend, apart from yours obviously, that would be too easy?
Jean-Baptiste: Of course. I thought about it before. Already the first one is, and it’s going to join the question you ask me after, it’ll be the same. It’s the latest book by Marc-André Selosse. You have to go meet Marc-André Selosse. He’s not in the wine subject but he’s just prodigious. He simplifies complicated things. I think in our winemaker baggage we need to understand chemically what’s at play, what a plant is, what a soil is to objectivize our practices. Even if our usual practices in the end aren’t bad but you have to understand why we do it even if we’ve already been told, the elders told us to do it like that. The elders were right, but what interests me is understanding why. So the book, the latest one there, “L’origine du monde” [The Origin of the World], I’m right in it. It’s a revelation for me to understand what’s happening scientifically under my feet. I have a second book. It’s a book I discovered in my research. It’s a book from 1879. I don’t remember anymore what it’s called, it’s a viticulture manual. It’s an author named Armand Cazenave, who was a winemaker in La Réole. I’m originally from La Réole, that particularly struck me. He was a winemaker who was of prodigious intelligence. He invented a manure mode, a type of pruning. The agricultural shows came to see him. He had an agricultural prize around that, around his book, around what he did. And at the time, in 1850, 1860 he was surprising everyone by making one hundred hectos of yield on the grape varieties he had at his place, on his practices. It’s absolutely prodigious whereas at the time we produced, yields were two to three times lower than today. This winemaker was making four to five times the average yield of Bordeaux through the intelligence of his agricultural practices. He wrote an agricultural précis where he explains what he does. For me it’s incredible to see how much winemakers had knowledge, intelligence. When you read a book like that it’s of incredible modernity. It’s a book that’s a bedside book for me. He’s the one who explains how to do bud sowing, how to graft. He observed all the pruning practices, he analyzed them. It’s a state of the art of agriculture in 1879 that’s absolutely fabulous. There’s someone who died recently, who is Dewey Markham who is an American in Bordeaux who wrote the history of the 1855 classification. And it had to be an American, like me who is a bit a foreigner who comes back and writes this story of Bordeaux, of its grape varieties. It’s absolutely fabulous to realize it’s a classification that was done a bit by chance. Half the classified growths didn’t even send their samples they don’t give a damn about participating in the 1855 classification. Today they hold to their classification, but we should re-check those who hadn’t sent their samples in 1855 by saying: “I’m sorry but you weren’t motivated in 1855 whereas today you tell me you want to keep your classification.”, it’s funny to put yourself back in the context. And to put yourself back in the context too if you get closer to what I wrote in my book, the context of oidium. That is, we release a classification in 1855 at a time when Bordeaux no longer produces wine, it’s incredible. The thumbing of nose is incredible. We make an honor bar to vaunt the magic of Bordeaux wines whereas we’re no longer capable of producing a good bottle of wine in Bordeaux. We build the classification on a time when only the rich manage to make wine given the scourge they have in their vines. It was a kind of communication honor bar. The 1855 classification in a time when they didn’t even know if the vine would survive. It’s quite funny. There are the three books I can recommend.
I’ll go read it with great pleasure and I think it’ll make me laugh. I like these stories.
Jean-Baptiste: The behind-the-scenes of the classification, it’s fabulous.
Diving back into a historical context, it’s incredible. The second traditional question, do you have a recent favorite tasting?
Jean-Baptiste: A recent favorite tasting? I hadn’t prepared that one. Antoine: Ah, there you go, you don’t listen to these podcasts to the end. Jean-Baptiste: What did I taste that I found nice? Yes, I bought last week two grape variety wines because I want to re-taste them because I’m replanting them. I discovered they existed in Bordeaux. I bought a mauzac and an ondenc from Robert Plageoles who is for me an incredible winemaker in the work he did on the grape variety, he’s actually my master. He’s the one who gave me the idea, a visit I did twenty years before arriving in Bordeaux to Robert Plageoles in Gaillac that gave me the desire. I told myself that if one day I made wine I’d do like Robert Plageoles. My idea of planting forgotten grape varieties comes from Robert Plageoles. There I tasted his ondenc which was a great sweet grape variety. There I tasted it dry, it’s a great bottle, it has fat, matter, it’s rich, it’s superb. And I discovered, for the little story, ondenc vines in old sémillon vines in Bordeaux, on the right bank. There was ondenc in Bordeaux. I found vines dating from 1900 in the ondenc. That’s how I went looking for these bottles. And there was ondenc in Bordeaux which was a great Gaillac white grape variety, formerly.
We expect to taste some at your place in a few years. The time you find them and plant them. We have a bit of time.
Jean-Baptiste: The times of the vine are long.
That’s clear. Last question, which you’ve already half answered, but I’ll ask it anyway, because I have to.
Jean-Baptiste: I’ve already cited two, you have to go meet Robert Plageoles.
Robert Plageoles, that would please me too.
Jean-Baptiste: He’s a historian.
I rediscovered Gaillac wines a bit last year. I didn’t know them at all and I found that incredible.
Jean-Baptiste: It’s an incredible grape variety. There are real originalities. Gaillac owes everything to Robert Plageoles who in the eighties said: “Okay stop, I’m stopping this Gaillac appellation that allows everything.” The Gaillac appellation is a bit of a drawer appellation that allows both Languedoc grape varieties but at the same time Bordeaux grape varieties, a kind of potpourri. And all of a sudden Robert Plageoles, in the eighties said: “We have an immense heritage and I’m going to revisit it, revisit these grape varieties of yore.” He did extraordinary work. By the way there’s a new generation of winemakers that has arrived behind and that has done work in the lineage of Robert Plageoles. You have to go meet Robert Plageoles who also does wonderful work on wild vines to return to the work that there was in the vines, there it is. Marc-André Selosse, we leave the universe of wine but I think we have to come back to basics. I mean we can only make great wine if we have soils. You have to go re-question these scientists. You interviewed Olivier Yobrégat. I could have recommended him, I think I’d have put him if you hadn’t already recommended him, I’d perhaps have put Loïc too.
We hug him obviously, he listens to us from time to time, Olivier with all our friends from Plaimont. It’s incredible. We hug them.
Jean-Baptiste: I could have put Loïc if you hadn’t already interviewed him. I think he’s still someone interesting in the work he did, incredible.
Despite him not doing parcel work…
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, but well, we argue, that’s part of the game. Who else? A winemaker maybe in Bordeaux, go meet either Henri Duporge around the work he does around Carménère. Or else Frédéric Mallier who, by buying his vines when he set up fifteen years ago found a pre-phylloxera parcel. He has thirty to forty hectares of vines in which there are eleven grape varieties. He has vines dating from 1860. This vine is incredible. It’s a Cordon de Royat with vines that are eight to twelve meters long. So the vine is twelve meters, with grapes all along. It’s just incredible. This parcel is the memory of Bordeaux. Frédéric has the project of replanting on free-standing roots. We could, among my acolytes too, go see David Barreau who replanted manseng and castets in Bordeaux and who, by favorite, replanted pineau d’aunis. A magnificent Loire grape variety in Bordeaux and who releases a super interesting cuvée, very spicy, incredible. I love what David does too.
You filled our itinerary for the next twelve months in Bordeaux.
Jean-Baptiste: There’s plenty to do. After that you also have to go to other regions. There are fascinating things everywhere.
It’s a promise, we’re going to do it.
Jean-Baptiste: And the modest grape variety meetings too.
Yes, I’d love to go, that would be super nice.
Jean-Baptiste: Jean Rosen, André Derieux or people like that who did wonderful work for the promotion of modest grape varieties.
They made a book actually that’s super cool, a dictionary of modest grape varieties, super nice.
Jean-Baptiste: André asked me to speak next year. He told me that in ten years of meetings we haven’t worked on the grape variety lead in the historical dimension of mixing geography and these health or political events and the influence on grape varieties. He told me what you’ve traced there over two centuries is super interesting because it can apply to all vineyards and it would be interesting if you came to tell that in Saint-Côme-d’Olt on November 5 and 6, 2022. I’ll be in Saint-Côme-d’Olt in the Aveyron next year.
I take this opportunity to also hug all our friends from Bon Grain de l’Ivresse where you’ve already been, another wine podcast.
Jean-Baptiste: Yes, they do a great job. I love the podcast format. It’s a format where we have time to develop. In the end, there aren’t many formats that allow that. The print press or even TV are formats where in the end you’re forced to simplify, find punchlines whereas the podcast format is a long format where you can address nuance, it’s true that it’s fascinating.
