For this 20th episode of the Wine Makers Show, we go to meet Loïc Pasquet, owner of Liber Pater. These names may mean nothing to you, and yet the estate is at the heart of a great fight for taste and for the defence of forgotten grape varieties in Bordeaux. Discover Loïc Pasquet’s vision for wine and dive into the world of Liber Pater.
Could you start by introducing yourself?
I am Loïc Pasquet, owner of Domaine de Liber Pater in the Graves at Landiras. I arrived here around 17 years ago out of a passion for wine. I’ve been passionate about wine since I was very young, I was a collector and I’m a wine lover. From Poitiers, I first studied in Poitiers, Math Sup and Math Spé in La Rochelle and an engineering school in Dijon. I ended up arriving in Bordeaux a few hundred years after Eleanor of Aquitaine. I like to remind people that Eleanor of Aquitaine was first a Poitevin before being a Bordelaise, and that the Aquitaine of her time was the Poitou-Charentes and the Limousin. The Aquitaine we know today is the Guyenne. So Eleanor of Aquitaine really was a Poitevin who promoted the wines of Bordeaux. A few hundred years later, there’s still a Poitevin coming to do something different in Bordeaux, and that’s a good thing. I had a happy childhood in the Poitou. I keep very, very fond memories of the Poitou. I moved away when I was 18 and I’ll soon have spent more time in Bordeaux than in the Poitou.
You talk about your passion for wine as a child, at what age did it start?
I started collecting wine when I must have been 11 or 12. This passion led me to set up a négociant business at 19. I created it in 1999 and I stopped it when I took over Liber Pater. This négociant business helped me enormously because it allowed me to really understand what the wine market was, what the consumer wanted. At a certain point, when you sell wine, you want to create your own product, especially when you realise there are major failings in terms of taste. When you see how wine used to be and what it no longer is today, I decided to buy this vineyard. I wanted to do something where we rediscover the wines of Bordeaux. There are also terroirs in Bordeaux and good winemakers, and it’s not just a typecast mass-market wine. That has always been Bordeaux’s problem. Perhaps because it’s sold through the négoce, but I think there’s more to it than that and we’ll get to it later.
You collect wines from the age of 12, can you tell me more?
We’d go to wine merchants, to supermarkets, we’d go and see the winemakers, we’d go into the cellars. It was thrilling. I learned the notion of terroir and of climats in Burgundy during my engineering school. I was extremely influenced by Burgundy, where I have a great many friends. I was trained by Burgundy and I owe them a big thank you. They are people who never gave in to the construction of taste, people who never gave in to getting a good score and quick profitability, they always sought to defend their terroir. Unlike Bordeaux, which built its taste to please Robert Parker. The Burgundians never gave in to that. I often say Burgundy is France, Bordeaux is England.
How did your parents react when, at 12, you told them you were going to start storing wine at home?
My parents loved wine, so it made them very happy. They were much more panicked when I told them I was going to create a vineyard. They always supported me because they always trusted me. I have a wonderful family, so I’m very lucky on a personal level.
You then create your négociant business?
I’d go and see winemakers in other regions of Bordeaux and I’d negotiate allocations by country. When the internet came along, I did online sales. This négociant business allowed me to meet the customer. I met people who can buy wine at 50 centimes as well as people who can buy wine at 100,000 to 200,000 euros a bottle. So I was able to form an opinion on the different types of wine, with common wines, substitute wines and great fine wines. There’s a market for everything and there are real enthusiasts who consider wine a cultural product, and others who drink wine because it’s a red hydro-alcoholic beverage. In Bordeaux, you have to make the choice of the right positioning.
Was your training in wine?
Not at all, I did Math Sup and Math Spé. So I did maths and physics flat out for two years. Just before, I’d done a bac F1: a mechanical engineering baccalaureate. Since it went rather well, I was offered the chance to take a “normal track”. When you’re offered the chance to do a prépa, you go. Then I did an engineering school in mechanics and chemistry. I quickly understood that it wasn’t my field. You study because you have the ability to study. You pass each level one after another. Sometimes you have little dips and then it gets better and you move forward. You don’t necessarily do what you want, but you’re told “as long as it’s going well, keep going”. You finish your studies and you realise you’ve learned things but that it’s not what you want to do. I told myself I wasn’t going to wait until I was 50 to change direction. I wasn’t going to be mediocre in my profession when I could potentially be talented in the world of wine. I took the risk of potentially being talented in the world of wine. Today I work 18 hours a day, whereas in my profession from school I’d perhaps only have done 7 or 8, in other words half as much, but it would have been far more painful. Today I get an enormous amount of pleasure from my profession, welcoming people, pruning my vines, and so on. The profession as a whole pleases me, the field of possibilities is huge and I don’t regret a single decision. If I had to do it again, I’d do exactly the same thing. !Interview at the Liber Pater cellar - Loïc Pasquet
How did you learn to make wine in that case?
I had an enormous stroke of luck, which is that before me no one was doing this job. No one was there to tell me what to do. I found myself facing a vine in 2004 and I had to do it. I went back to see Burgundy, a few winemakers in Bordeaux, and I read a lot. François Dubreuil helped me a great deal. By meeting lots of people you form an opinion on what wine should be. No one ever imposed anything on me and that’s an enormous stroke of luck. I was completely free to intellectualise the vine, its layout, its densities.
Can you tell us about your arrival here?
I’d had a négociant business for 10 years, so from 2000 / 2001 I told myself I needed to create my own wine. When you read the literature of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, you realise that the taste of wine has changed. Before, people talked about violet, hyacinth. Wine was described in terms of flowers, finesse, precision. Wine was described nothing like the way it’s described today. Today when you describe a wine, you say “full body, fat, fruity, vanilla”. Vanilla was a fashion and tomorrow it’ll be cereals. Wine is built like a soup. Today, the taste of wine in Bordeaux is built on the quality of the variety. That is to say, people say they want 80% Merlot because it’s fat and makes alcohol, 10% Cabernet because it’s the structure and 10% Petit Verdot because it’s the pepper. We put all that in barrel and we build a taste on what pleases the critics. We play on the quality and variety of the grapes and not on the expression of the place. If tomorrow Asia tells us “what we like is cereals”, we’ll make wines with the taste of cereals. I tell myself that we’re in the process of building a taste, that we’re negating our culture and our know-how. So I’d wonder, when I look at an 1855 bottle, what’s left of 1855? Is there nothing left? Before it was ungrafted, today it’s grafted, the densities were much higher, the land area is much larger. Before, properties were 20 hectares, today they’re 100. When you have a property of 100 hectares, the place ultimately matters little. If you do the same thing on 100 hectares as on 20, it means you’re building a wine on the quality of the variety and not of the place. Then, the grape varieties are no longer the same either. People talked about Tarnay, Castets, Cabernet, Petit Verdot. All that seemed to me to be a heresy. So I told myself I needed to find a place. I was looking for a high place of viticulture, with a particular geology and where you could plant ungrafted vines. To rediscover the taste of wine, you had to make a minimalist wine, stripped of everything. You had to plant an ungrafted vine, put the grape varieties back on the lands that saw them born; that is to say the petite vidure on the gravel, the petit verdot in the wet zones, the castets on the cool gravelly zones, the tarnay on the frost-prone gravelly zones. For me a wine is fermented grapes. You had to strip the whole cellar bare. Wine should be finesse and elegance. Today we build competition beasts that don’t hold up over time and that collapse after 30 or 40 years. Whereas if you compare a wine from 1860 and a wine from 1960, the one from 1860 is fresher. Becoming aware of all that, I told myself I needed to rediscover what made the richness of Bordeaux. For five years, I searched for a place. I ruled nothing out, I looked at Saint-Émilion, in the Entre-deux-Mers (with fabulous terroirs). I came across the Graves. It was elderly people who were selling, and people would tell me “here we don’t know why, but it always turns out good”. What’s more, it was the wine of the clergy just before the First World War. The clergy weren’t completely foolish and they liked to drink rather good wines. It was also the territory of Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac. Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac was the niece of Montaigne. Vines have always been grown here: from the 12th century. What’s very funny is that the husband of Saint Jeanne de Lestonnac ended up cut into pieces and crucified on the gates of the town of Poitiers. And today, I, a Poitevin, am buying back his lands. There were still ungrafted vines when I bought back this vineyard.
Buy the graphic novel about Liber Pater
Can you tell us more about what an ungrafted vine is?
An ungrafted vine is a vine that has no American rootstock. In 1860 an insect came from the United States. It’s one of the first signs of globalisation. It’s an insect that crossed the sea by boat. Before, it would die during the journey. As exchanges became faster and faster, it was able to survive. It settled in the south of France and destroyed all the French vines. People say it destroyed all the French vines but that’s completely false. The left bank in Bordeaux never had phylloxera. The Baron de Rothschild said “I preserved all my vines from phylloxera” in 1936. I found all that in the Bordeaux archives. There’s a map in the Bordeaux archives that clearly shows that the left bank never had phylloxera except for the Sauternais and the Gironde estuary. In 1904, the estate manager of Château Margaux wrote in his memoirs “since I grafted the vines, I’ve lost the taste of Château Margaux”. There are plenty of accounts showing that people were content not to uproot the vines because the rootstock destroys the taste of the wine. We were forced to plant American vine stock and by doing so we lost part of our genetic heritage. So we went from about twenty grape varieties down to 5 grape varieties. We also abandoned fine wines to enter an industrialisation where taste matters little. We enter an industrial logic. The notion of terroir is forgotten at that point. The rootstock increases the vigour of the vine. People told themselves it was wonderful and continued to produce a lot. !Liber Pater label - La Fleur After the Second World War it’s the coup de grâce for fine wines. France had to be rebuilt and produce in quantity. People favoured the grape varieties that produce enormously, that make the most alcohol. The specifications for the clones are very clear: people want alcohol and quantity. Bordeaux definitively loses the notion of terroir. In the end, the idea was that if all that was lost, it means it can be redone. So I needed a place where you could plant ungrafted vines. It’s as if you went to Vienna, you open an old cupboard and you find an old Mozart score that no one knows anymore. You take Mozart’s instruments, you’re going to play Mozart. Of course you’re not going to play exactly like Mozart, but at least you’re not going to play Chopin. That’s exactly what I wanted to do by rediscovering the old grape varieties, by finding a historic terroir of Bordeaux. I restored this vineyard as it was before phylloxera. Of course we’re not going to do it like the old-timers. I often hear people say “if these grape varieties were abandoned, it means they weren’t good”. Well, these people still created Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot. So if they’d been bad, we’d know. I think they were abandoned because we negated the terroir and because we favoured productivism and the construction of a taste like a soup. The old-timers had understood that to make a fine wine, you had to do a late harvest with grape varieties that have long cycles. We have grape varieties that bud at the end of April but that we harvest at the start of October. Every high place is different and so every place must have its own grape variety. On the other hand, I think we have more mastery of things than the old-timers did in the cellar. There are fewer deviations than back then.
So this is what you do here
Yes, I arrive in 2004 and in 2007 I uproot everything. I keep a tiny bit of grafted vines to see the differences. When we tasted to compare the two it was quite incredible. When you want to build a soup it’s extremely reproducible and so it’s very boring. Rousseau, when he was in the Médoc, said: “when I go to the Médoc, I taste wines that have the taste of violet”. When you put ungrafted vines back, you rediscover the taste of violet and it’s extremely moving. If you come to my place in the middle of summer, you’ll see, you can smell the flowers, the bread, the dried grass, and the wines smell of that. A place is something unique: it is beyond fashions and beyond time.
But climate change could call the place into question, precisely
Well, would you believe it, no. When you have a grafted vine, its vegetative cycle stops when it’s too cold or it gets stressed when it’s too hot. For me, on my place, I harvest on 4 October. In 2018, it rained a lot, I harvested on 4 October. Last year, we had 2 months of drought but I harvested on 4 October. The vine is extremely vine in Bordeaux: it’s more than 2,000 years old. The vine has had to learn to adapt. In 950 AD, there was the medieval optimum, that is to say a warming that lasted about 250 years. Grape varieties were created during that period, for sure, and we have their children today. They are able to resist provided they are ungrafted. I’m convinced that the answer to climate change, we have it in our historic grape varieties. For example, the Tarnay is a grape variety so old that we know neither the father nor the mother. We see that it’s the only grape variety that doesn’t freeze and that doesn’t produce a single yellow leaf when it freezes. So it’s a grape variety made to last. In 1855, Château d’Issan was 100% Tarnay. The big problem we have is the French administration, which doesn’t want us to use these old grape varieties. My idea is to draw on our old genetic heritage, so let’s have the authorisation to use these grape varieties. Today, if you want to use these grape varieties, you have to leave the AOC. In any case the AOC today no longer makes sense, because the AOC is the production of an industrial wine. It might be good to give the AOC back its 1936 meaning and once again make wines with origin, local know-how, and so on. We’ve abandoned this label to industry. That’s why many winemakers switch to Vin de France. It’s tragic. We can’t abandon these historic grape varieties and this taste of Bordeaux wine, because it’s part of our culture. Today when a whale washes up on a beach, we tell ourselves it’s catastrophic. We all agree on that. But there’s something even more catastrophic, which is that tastes disappear. Unlike a whale, a taste can’t be seen when it disappears. It’s not lost yet. I rediscovered old grape varieties, but it can be done in plenty of other fields. We mustn’t accept that taste disappears. The future isn’t McDonald’s. And talking about a dish is culture. I think that wine, when it’s well made, is an ephemeral work of art.
How would you advise going about rediscovering the taste of things?
I think you have to buy products whose origin you know, so buy vegetables from a market gardener. You have to make a point of rediscovering things made by the rules of the art. Then, you have to find fine wines. We know the winemakers who make fine wines in France. They’re well known and you can find them easily. You have to relearn food and wine pairings. That’s culture, it’s learning, it takes a lot of time. It’s in the diversity of taste that the wine of Bordeaux must be built. You still have to know that the CIVB’s slogan is tragic: “Bordeaux, many châteaux, one style”. I don’t know if you see the scale of the damage. It means that the wine should have the same taste everywhere. And you have to fight against that.
On arriving, did you shake things up?
It’s a divisive discourse, but we can no longer settle for the roughly-good-enough. We’re at a moment when we have to save the taste of things. Either we abandon everything to globalisation and everything has to be the same everywhere, or we consider that we’re in a global world but that each country and each region has its own culture. We can’t think we’re nothing: that we come from nowhere and that the only thing that matters is having the latest iPhone.
There’s a book about this quest: le goût retrouvé du vin de Bordeaux
It’s a wine book written by Jacky Rigaux and Jean Rosen that takes up my story about taste and how we rediscovered the taste of Bordeaux wine, and which has a foreword by Stéphane Derenoncourt. We make a synthesis of everything we’d found about the wines of Bordeaux.
We talk in particular about everything we did to bring these elements back up to date on the terroir of Liber Pater. What we haven’t said about Liber Pater is that it’s located in a very particular spot: on an anticline. It’s a geological formation that is 50 million years old. At the bottom you find oysters and sponges with Brach clay underneath and gravel on top. This gravel was deposited by a river that flowed above and below the anticline. The Liber Pater vineyard is on the bed of a primitive river.
On your label, it’s written: god of wine, wine of the gods. What does that mean to you?
When I created Liber Pater, I didn’t want to create yet another château. I found that completely has-been. It was perhaps classy under Napoleon III, but now it seems outdated. Especially when you see the châteaux, and not all châteaux are châteaux. The true Roman god of wine is Liber Pater. The Roman poets said Bacchus for the rhymes, but the true god of wine was Liber Pater.
How do you go about selling a wine as exclusive as yours?
When you produce a work of art, you produce something unique. The great wine enthusiasts know wine very well. Those who buy Romanée-Conti, or Egon Müller, don’t buy the wine because it’s expensive, but because they know it. To taste Liber Pater is to taste the historic taste of Bordeaux wines with a finesse that has completely disappeared. They buy a part of the history of France, a truly forgotten taste. It’s something unique made nowhere else. We have ambassadors around the world. We have 10 to 24 bottles per country and people look after our enthusiasts in each country. We go through the négoce little or not at all, because at the start it didn’t understand the approach and they sell scores more than a story or a place. !Petit Bacchus - Liber Pater
What is the future for Liber Pater?
We’re going to enlarge the cellar. Liber Pater is one hectare and that’s going to stay that way. We’re also going to create plot-based cuvées to have an expression of the place. My dream would be to make ungrafted vines in a historic country like Italy or Greece. When you’ve tasted fine wines, you can’t go back. When you’ve started tasting ungrafted vines, you don’t backtrack. When you’ve tasted the expression of the place at its very best, you can’t go back. One day, a Chinese client came to see me and told me “in 10 years we’ll be making great wines in China”. I told him “why not, and in 10 years I’ll be making great teas in France”. He told me that wasn’t possible. It’s not a matter of moving the variety to make great wines. In the long term, I’d like to pass it on to my daughters so they can continue the adventure.
Do you have a wine book to recommend to me?
Yes, I recommend Le climat, le vigneron et le gourmet by Jacky Rigaux. It’s very interesting, he takes several winemakers across Europe and it’s great.
He has the graphic novel too because it’s really interesting. It takes up the whole history of the Liber Pater vineyard. We see the building of Liber Pater and all the battles fought, because it went quite far; all the way to the criminal courts. But it doesn’t matter going to the criminal courts if it’s to save the taste of wine.
Buy the graphic novel about Liber Pater
Do you have a recent favourite tasting?
The thing I’d recommend is an ungrafted Sicilian wine called Tenuta delle Terre Nere and it’s very, very good. It’s important to broaden your horizons.
Who do you advise me to invite for the next episodes?
I’m going to recommend four. First a winemaker who makes La Tour de Mélas in Greece. His vines grow on temple ruins so it’s quite incredible. Then, I advise you to go and see a person who is important to me: his name is Olivier Yobrégat at the institute of wine and the vine. He is extremely positive for the world of wine. We brought the old grape varieties out of the conservatories to put them back in the vineyard. Otherwise, I invite you to go and see someone who does a lot for winemakers and for French cuisine: it’s the chef of the Élysée, Guillaume Gomez, and Virginie Routis who is the sommelier there. When we talk about a French cultural product, it’s good to talk to those who defend it.
