For the 30th episode of the Wine Makers Show, we head off to meet Ivan Massonnat at Domaine Belargus. Just launched, the estate has plenty of surprises in store for us. Remember the name, because his ambitions and those of his teams are nowhere near done. In this episode, we take you to discover Ivan. Enjoy the listen.
Can you start by introducing yourself?
My name is Ivan Massonnat. I think the more time goes by, the more I can be defined by my relationship with wine. It’s taking up an important place in my life now. But my journey has been quite different. I’m a telecom engineer by training and I actually started out working in tech. After that, I fell into a fascinating profession, private equity, where you invest in the capital of companies and buy them out. That’s the job I’ve been doing for 20 years, an absolutely fascinating profession, probably the only finance job I could have done and one in which I really thrive. Alongside this rich professional life, a real passion for the wine world grew. That passion made me say “one day, this could maybe be my life.” Along the way, I made some encounters. Two years ago, a decisive encounter happened. A project has been put in place since, whose launch we celebrated yesterday: Domaine Belargus.
Can we come back to this passion for wine: how did it come to you?
We have to go back a bit further. I was born in Savoie, in a tiny village where I lived until I was 18. I was very close to my grandfather. My grandfather had family vineyards. I only realized as an adult, a bit like a Proustian madeleine waking up, that those atmospheres of cellars, fermentations, barrels, distillations, work in the vines, harvest days, etc., had somehow set the rhythm of my childhood. As an adult, around 20 to 25, I started drinking a bit of wine. Right away, it felt natural to go and meet winemakers. The product is interesting, but how do you make wine? That’s when old childhood memories came back. I told myself “I love it, I love being in a cellar, listening to the winemaker, asking questions.” Obviously, the product is interesting, but it’s what’s around it. I really see wine as a product of civilization, it’s something other than a beverage. So what interests me is what surrounds it. What interests me is the human element, the landscapes, the history, the geography, the gastronomy, everything that surrounds a bottle. As an adult I really nurtured this passion, it fed on encounters. The region that really tipped me into this passion is Burgundy. Maybe it’s my engineer side, and I think it’s a parallel with your own journey as an enthusiast, because I felt a kind of frustration at the very beginning with Burgundy. That is, I understood this region was super complicated. There was just one grape variety, pinot noir, but a myriad of appellations, lieux-dits, climats. 247, I believe. When I was doing horizontal tastings with certain winemakers, who have since become friends, I was really frustrated. I couldn’t understand how you could have such different wines, when sometimes they came from parcels 500 meters or 1 kilometer apart. That quest fed me. Everything that nourished my passion for wine was the thirst to learn, to understand. On one hand, the notion of terroir wine. There are different visions of wine; mine is the notion of what we call “vin de lieu,” wine of place. Wine comes from a precise place, it can be a village, a parcel, a region; the level of precision can vary. That’s the vision of wine I developed, and Burgundy provided me with a textbook case. To understand, you have to read. I read, read, read. I subscribed to everything that existed in the wine world. Then I wanted to buy books, more and more pointed, more precise. Of course, when you start, you realize that the final product, a bottle, a liquid, a fermented grape juice, is the result of a thousand actions, choices and decisions made by winemakers. And that fascinated me. The fact that on a few steps of the process you can focus on, you can dive into detail almost infinitely. That ranged from the forest where the trees that give a certain shape of barrel grow, to vinification methods, or specific moments. I’m thinking of a discussion I had one day with a Burgundian winemaker who explained to me tests he had done over several years on fining a wine, which is a micro-operation that some winemakers do on their wine. At each step of this process, there are a thousand possible decisions, and obviously a thousand possible results. That quest nourished me. You never get to the bottom of it, and a lifetime won’t be enough to understand. That’s the magic of wine, that’s what makes it a noble product, an exceptional product. It’s a living product, the result of an alignment between a person and a terroir, going back millennia.
You’re between 20 and 25. How does it work in very practical terms? Do you just go to wine bars and try to taste? Do you go to tastings? Do you visit places? What’s your life like at that time?
Very quickly, I went to meet winemakers. I don’t really know why. You can meet winemakers, for example, at the very start, at the Salon des vignerons indépendants, which back in my day was fabulous. We had very, very great winemakers, who were always there at their little stands presenting their wines. For example, that was a very concrete way to go meet winemakers without having to drive hundreds of kilometers. And then of course, when I had a bit of time, I tried to combine that with trips with my wife, we’d spend a weekend in Burgundy, a weekend in Bordeaux. I really fed off these encounters. To buy wine, that’s a bit how I did it too. Paradoxically, I know it’s not the most common, I rarely visited wine merchants. Often, when you start, you go see the prescribers, the people who know, and I wanted right away to go to the source and form my own opinion. My tastes have evolved over the years, but they’ve kept refining themselves. After that, there are big guidelines: I’m rather someone who likes northern wines, that is, mono-varietal wines, that’s the difference between northern wines and more southern wines; rather wines on finesse and elegance; even though I love all styles of wine, I lean toward this type. And I drink wine as a gastronomic companion. For me, it’s not interesting to drink this beverage alone, it has to accompany food. I love eating well, I love good things. There’s a form of hedonism in this search too. Finding good pairings has also become my passion. Food and wine pairings are also a whole universe. At one point, I wanted to have foundations, I’d really say foundations, so I took a few classes, tasting classes, to have a minimum vocabulary. Not with the idea of being knowledgeable and being able to pull out the right adjective or aroma, but more to be able to decode a wine. Notably to be able to decode flaws, an important part of the training, and to go beyond “I like, I don’t like.” Even though today, now that I’ve done all this journey and I find myself a wine producer, I prefer to go toward people who are only able to tell me “I like, I don’t like,” paradoxically. Because the experts who give long speeches aren’t always those who feel wine in the most sensitive way. For me, wine has to remain an emotional product. We shouldn’t try to rationalize everything, we’ll never manage to explain what’s happening in a bottle of wine, fortunately. The emotion of a tasting moment isn’t something reproducible, because it’s obviously human. Yesterday, at our launch event, there was a wonderful guy named Gabriel Lepousez, who is a researcher in the neuroscience of taste, someone who has written many works on the subject, fascinating, who would explain much better than me how this tasting is anything but simple to understand and anything but rational. I did a minimum of training, and that was the only technical baggage I had. We’ll come back to the Belargus project, because I found myself building a fairly ambitious estate, of a certain size, with a complete construction, and people often say to me “but how do you know how to make wine?” And I just say “I’m self-taught.” Today we’ll talk about Jo Pithon, who is one of the winemakers I crossed paths with, who was decisive for me. His expression is to say “I learned everything with a glass in hand.” He himself considered himself self-taught. Self-taught people are sometimes people who are actually extremely sharp, extremely precise, but who rely on more empirical know-how and a skill acquisition they’ve forged for themselves. There were times I wanted to understand the agricultural part more, then there were times I told myself “okay, I know enough, I don’t know everything, okay, but I know enough.” After that, I told myself “let’s look at vinification.” And there I’d spend more time deepening certain points. There are times, especially at the beginning, as I was explaining, where it was more tasting, to be able to understand how you make a wine, what’s a light wine, what’s a wooded wine. By successive touches, I think it always happened with a glass in hand, I learned, I accumulated skills, until the moment I felt ready. I can perhaps detail the steps. I had the chance through this profession, which is still very lucrative, I never thought I’d earn such a good living to be honest, and so there was a moment in my journey where I told myself “I have quite a bit of savings, what can I do with it?” And there I followed the classic path, that is, I started by collecting. I have the soul of a collector. And that’s fabulous because the wine world is full of gems, rare bottles, limited cuvées, etc. Especially in Burgundy, you can really treat yourself. I collected really aiming for extreme diversity. In my cellars I have a number of bottles, I have very few bottles per reference, but I have an extremely varied number of references, because I love discovering. I never buy more than three bottles, sometimes just one bottle. My greatest pleasure is going down to the cellar telling myself “tonight we have these guests, who have this relationship with food and wine, here’s what we’re going to prepare to eat, I have this treasure in my cellar, I need to bring it up tonight, for these people. I bought it 15 or 20 years ago, but tonight is when we drink it.” That’s really my great pleasure. I first collected, then along the way I was earning a bit more money, and I told myself “now I have savings I could invest.” When you have a bit of money, the first reflex is to say “well, I’m going to buy stocks; I’m going to buy a small studio I’ll rent out; I’m going to buy a parking spot.” Then I looked at all that, and I said “no.” I didn’t think I’d earn so much money in my life, so I might as well use this money to give it meaning. And how to give it more meaning than going where my passion is, ultimately buying vines? And there I told myself “I could invest my money by buying vines. I know lots of winemakers. Maybe some would be interested in having someone buy vines and lease them back.” That’s how I started to buy a few vines.
You weren’t thinking at all about creating an estate? Maybe it was a dream?
Objectively, it was a very vague dream at the time. I was telling myself “it’s a very committing act.” When you buy land, it’s far from liquid. These are very long-term investments, so I told myself “if I start investing in vineyard land, that means sooner or later I’ll have to maybe go further.” But I wasn’t pressuring myself at all. It was still very vague.
And these first vines you buy, was that the future Domaine Belargus?
Oh no, not at all. There, it’s the fruit of an encounter. About twenty years ago, I met a young winemaker named Thibault Liger-Belair, who is a great Côte de Nuits winemaker. I was lucky to know him at the start when he was taking over the family vines. He set up an estate by taking back vines that had been leased out for many generations. He’s one of the winemakers who inspired me. His extremely sensitive approach to wines, the biodynamics he set up right away, and his personality which I really liked, inspired me. He’s someone who decided in 2008 to build an estate in Nuits-Saint-Georges, one of the most renowned appellations, on Moulin-à-Vent. In the Beaujolais crus, partly because he knew how much Beaujolais could produce great wines, and also, this is an anecdote he tells very often, he had found in the attic of the family house, his family’s price lists from about a century ago, where Moulin-à-Vent was sold at the same price as Vosne-Romanée. And we’ve forgotten that. The flood of Beaujolais Nouveau, which was invented after the war, and the trivialization of Beaujolais’s image made us forget that. He was one of the first, in 2008, to say “these are great terroirs, on Moulin-à-Vent, with a Burgundian approach.” He immediately made wines from different climats on Moulin-à-Vent, he made parcel-by-parcel wines. I told him “if one day you find beautiful vines, I could absolutely buy them.” The opportunity arose. It led to another project: in 2015, he found a great vineyard on a Moulin-à-Vent climat, and to do the deal, as they say, to buy the vineyard, we had to also take on five and a half hectares in the neighboring village, in the Beaujolais-Village appellation. Thibault said “it’s all Beaujolais Village, I don’t want to do that, but I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth, and I tell myself young people, who don’t have my luck, we could give them a leg up, we could imagine a sort of incubator for young winemakers, and it could be called ‘le Domaine des Jeunes Pousses’ [The Young Shoots Estate].” I said “Done, let’s do it.” We bought the eight hectares. At the start, Thibault bought vines, organic, he had the means to distribute that wine. And then in 2019 we found a house at the top of this village, a pretty residential house, with a part that could have been a winery. We bought it and actually since last year we created Domaine des Jeunes Pousses. The first young shoots, Thibault found them, they’re a young Jura couple, who are great. I invite you to go see them. They’re called Angela and Hugo, they have the project of one day setting up in the Jura. But for the next three years, starting with the 2020 vintage, which they’ve just put in the cellar, they’ll be at Domaine des Jeunes Pousses. They’ll write the first chapter, since our vision is, every three years, we change young shoots and we give them three vintages to express themselves, learn the ropes, manage an estate, do business. All under Thibault’s caring guidance. It’s a human adventure. It’s a digression, but it’s a human adventure that has allowed us to keep seeing each other on this kind of project. They’re great, we even ran a crowdfunding campaign, which actually may not be over: winefunding.com, to help us a bit. Don’t hesitate to go check it out.
So there you start buying vines like that. How does it work when you buy vines? Is it classic, you go to the notary, sign a paper?
It’s classic, but far from simple. There’s notably an organization in France called SAFER, which is a key organization in vineyard transactions. They have a right of preemption on all vineyard transactions. And then we deal, all the time, with family situations, more or less complex. So my profession, in a way, helped me think about my project. I had some experience with vineyard transactions, notions of law. If we move forward in the story a bit, I have to say that fifteen years ago, we bought a house near our place, a house we adore, in a small village, a 16th-century house, in which we have many memories. And for the past fifteen years, the Loire has become like an obvious choice for me. I got interested in it. There too I met winemakers. I tasted cabernet franc, chenin. As little by little in my mind the idea, the dream, of one day having my own estate took shape, there was something obvious for me: it would be in the Loire. The only thing I was sure of was that it would be in the Loire. The rest, I didn’t know, but I was sure it would be in the Loire. We’ll come back to it, but I really think the Loire is a phenomenal French wine region, still very much underestimated by the market. I’m not talking about the microcosm, because the microcosm has understood and snaps up Loire wines, which are absolutely incredible gems. The market itself hasn’t yet understood and still sees the Loire as a region of “small wines.” I told myself “it has to be in the Loire.” I’m a fairly patient person, it’s a personality trait, and I started searching. I started my search around our house. I spent a lot of time on an acquisition that didn’t happen.
And there, you knock on doors and say “are you for sale”?
Not quite, because there are intermediaries too, people whose job is to say “I sell your estate, I’ll find buyers.” So the file I’d spent the most time on, that’s the one I’d found through this kind of intermediary. And since it was close to home, in an environment I knew a little, I really had the means to position myself on this project. It’s a transaction that didn’t happen, because I may be passionate, I may have one hemisphere of the brain that’s very creative, capable of taking risks, but I have another hemisphere of the brain that’s very rational. And since it was my hard-earned money I was investing, there has to be a counterpart. So I won’t go into details, because it’s a transaction that still hasn’t happened. Ten years it’s been for sale and it’s still not sold. And I don’t know if it ever will be. What I know is that after a year of in-depth work, ultimately it didn’t happen. So I continued my search. Along the way, I realized that of the two grape varieties of the Loire, two emblematic varieties, it was chenin I had to go toward. That happened along the way, partly because I’d had feedback from winemaker friends. I’d talk to them about cabernet, they’d say “yeah yeah, it’s good.” I’d talk to them about chenin, they’d say “wow, chenin is one of the greatest white grape varieties. In the Loire there are extraordinary terroirs, so you should go all in on chenin.” There I told myself “ah, if winemakers tell me that, maybe it’s true.” So I started searching again. Progressively, my center of gravity, following encounters with winemakers, with intermediaries, with people from SAFER, moved westward. I found myself looking in Anjou, so around Angers, what’s called Anjou Noir, lots of estates for sale. And there, my investor hat made me say “hmm, that’s odd, I’m in a region where there are lots of estates for sale. Why?” The reason was obvious: actually, around Angers, in the region called Anjou Noir, on the schists, there are lots of sweet wine appellations, which were very famous, with wines that have crossed the centuries, but which, no need to spell it out, haven’t been selling for the past twenty years. It’s a region that has this challenge to face. That’s why there are lots of properties for sale, because the children don’t necessarily want to take over from their parents. Not all winemakers of the previous generation have made the switch to dry wines, which is the obvious thing to do. Not all have done it, for historical reasons, etc. There I told myself “that’s interesting.” Because in a fairly limited area, I’ll be able to look if there isn’t something exceptional. It’s the kind of project you do once in your life. I had the idea of building something exceptional. I wasn’t into the idea of just having an estate, period. I wanted to build something rare. I started looking, and there too I started looking at a first file, a second, a third, a fourth. There’s one I also spent a lot of time on. Not a year, but a good six months. I went very far. Then, all it took was an encounter, which I can talk about right away, to tip me into this Domaine Belargus adventure. Early 2018, it happened at the Salon des vins de Loire: one of the winemakers I was talking to, Patrick Baudoin, who is a great white wine maker from this region, said to me, at the time we were on formal terms, “you should go see Mr. Jo Pithon. Jo has handed things over. At his estate, he tried to pass things on to his children. For several reasons, that didn’t happen. Now he’s ready to sell.” February 5, 2018, we’re at the Salon des vins de Loire, I go see Jo, it goes well, he’s a very nice, affable person. And he tells me “tomorrow morning, before going back to Paris, taking your train, you come at 8 a.m. and I’ll show you the vines.” I go, and to be transparent, the contact had been good, but I went a bit without really believing it. Plus, it was snowing that day. I’ll always remember it. February 6. I find myself in the small car, between Angers and Saint-Lambert du Lattay. I’d never been to Saint-Lambert du Lattay in my life. It’s twenty minutes by car, I tell myself “well, it’s snowing, I’m going to miss my train, this is great, he’s nice, but well.” And there we arrive, he takes me to the foot of the vines, notably at the foot of what was the great work of his life, a terroir called the coteau des Treilles. There I had a shock, it was really love at first sight. There I told myself: “Ah! This certainly doesn’t exist in the Loire, I think there’s only one terroir like this in the Loire, and even in France, I think it’s one of the high places of wine.” To make it very short, it’s a parcel called les Treilles, it’s a hillside that had always been covered with vines, postcards from a century ago attest to this, but had been abandoned after the war. The Layon is a small river that flows from East to West, and so there’s a geological fault, fairly steep, exposed due south. And the Coteaux du Layon were historically there. Today they’re covered with forests and scrubland. They were all abandoned, because too difficult to cultivate. It’s a bit like the story of Côte-Rôtie. Thirty years ago in Côte-Rôtie, there wasn’t a single vine on the slopes. The great winemakers of the time bought back the slopes, they replanted vines on the slopes, and Côte-Rôtie is what it is today. Jo had the somewhat crazy idea, in the late 1990s, to say “actually here, there were vines just opposite, and what if I replanted a small bit of vine on these slopes opposite?” And then, with his wife Isabelle, they tried to find owners. They found one, then two, then three, then four. Actually, they spent five years of their life buying 70 parcels, from 25 owners, and they reconstituted, they consolidated this parcel called les Treilles, which is in a nature reserve. There too, we don’t have time to explain everything, but actually the place where this vine parcel is located has been studied by botanists since the 18th century, because there’s a Mediterranean microclimate. So there are species that have no business being in Anjou, because we have this exposure. It’s a microclimate that has been studied by botanists. In the 20th century, a canon set up a learned society to study the rocky peak there is on the coteau des Treilles. In 2009, it was officially transformed into a regional nature reserve, so classified, protected, ten hectares, managed with the LPO, the bird protection league. It’s an extraordinary biodiversity setting, it has never known chemicals. There’s a number of species and a number of individuals per species, whether of flowers, fauna, that’s totally incredible. Visually, it’s also a graphic shock, it’s a very steep hillside, up to 70% slope. It’s a terroir that really doesn’t leave you indifferent. There I told myself “this is it.” Actually, I’m very far from Chinon. I’m an hour and a half by car from Chinon. Anjou, I didn’t know it, I told myself “it has to be here, this is going to be the starting point of the adventure.” And so there we are, in spring 2018.
At that moment, you take the train back to Paris? What do you tell yourself at that moment?
Yes. In my little car under the snow, going back, I tell myself “ah, actually it’s here. No need to keep looking, because I’ll never find anything as intense.” It’s a terroir you have to see once in your life. I invite you to come to Anjou, we’ll welcome you very well at the estate, you’ll go up on the coteau des Treilles with us and you’ll see it’s a place that doesn’t leave you indifferent. So I tell myself “it’s here.” Very quickly, with Jo it was a fairly perfect fit, even though from afar you might say it’s a bit of a strange alchemy, me, Parisian financier, him, Jo Pithon with the personality we know. Actually, right away we found common ground on wine. It’s hard to summarize his career, but in two words, he was one of the pioneers who really took strong positions on organic very early, on terroir work, parcel work, on dry chenin. He’s someone who has done a lot of things for Anjou. He wasn’t the only one. He’s part of the generation of Mark Angeli and Richard Leroy. They’re really people who worked a lot to have the greatness of these terroirs recognized, each on their own estate. Very quickly, we understood in spring that we wanted to do business together. We got “to work” right away. I wasn’t yet the owner, it’s very complicated to acquire a wine estate. On the other hand, he only had nine hectares of vines left. And that wasn’t enough for me. In my logic of “terroir collector,” he had two immense terroirs, which were the coteau des Treilles of course, and the parcel just opposite, called the clos des Bonnes Blanches. These two terroirs, I told myself “that’s brilliant.” The others were interesting… but well. There a bit of magic happened. That is, between March 2018 and September, there was a succession of opportunities and encounters. I can detail them. But when I rewind the film, I tell myself “it’s just incredible.” Because if I’d wanted to build an estate with some of the most beautiful terroirs of Anjou Noir, I would have wanted terroirs like les Treilles and Bonne Blanche, I would have wanted a bit of Quarts-de-Chaume, because Quarts-de-Chaume is the only grand cru of the Loire, and I would of course have wanted Savennières and Savennières on the rock. What’s incredible is that in the six months that passed, in 2018, I was able to do this. I built up an estate where the first part of the vines were Jo’s, so the nine hectares on the Coteaux du Layon. And then, I called back someone I had seen two years earlier, who was selling, in the Quarts-de-Chaume appellation, not one parcel, two parcels, who was actually selling the historic heart of the appellation. It had been for sale for ten years, and at the time, I’d passed on it, like everyone, because it’s a terroir that’s still very expensive for Anjou. It’s a grand cru, it’s a micro appellation of forty hectares. And actually, this family was selling ten hectares, so a quarter, which were the ten historic hectares at the heart of the appellation. This family had been the owner of the majority of the appellation, had sold a part to a Château de Suronde, then other parcels, over the years. And then, around their house they had ten hectares all in one piece, notably including the three historic parcels of Quarts-de-Chaume, which are on the decree creating the appellation: one called les Quarts, I’ll come back to les Quarts because it’s the parcel that gave its name to the appellation; and the two adjacent parcels, les Roueres and le Veau. Jo had been crazy enough, in 2008, to make a dry cuvée on Quarts-de-Chaume. It’s a touch of madness, because people generally have very little Quarts-de-Chaume in surface area, and since it’s the only grand cru of the Loire, generally it’s their top of the range, so they obviously make it sweet, since Quarts-de-Chaume is an appellation that today is sweet. And he, had had the idea of making a dry, called Anjou, which was one of the cuvées I really liked. I told myself “you can’t dream of a more mythical terroir in Anjou than Quarts-de-Chaume, and if I could acquire this gem, the historic heart of the appellation, we could do parcel-by-parcel dry wines.” So I called this gentleman back: “Do you remember me? - Yes, yes, I remember you. - Is the Quarts-de-Chaume still for sale?” He tells me “Ah, you’re out of luck. I’ve been negotiating with someone for six [years], we’ve reached an agreement, we’re going to the notary next Thursday, so it’s done, I’m selling all the Quarts-de-Chaume vines and the house.” And there I have a flash, I tell him “but wait, I don’t understand, your wife adored that house, I have a hard time imagining she sold it.” And he tells me “I convinced her, because actually the buyer is leaving us ten years of use. We’re selling to them, but they’re letting us live there for ten years, so I convinced her.” There I tell him “well listen, if you want, I’ll just buy the vines from you. You wanted a price, I’ll give you the price you wanted, I’ll just buy the vines.” There he tells me “no.” The next day he calls me back. We talk. The day after that, the sale was broken and we both signed. I became his wife’s best friend. There, they’re happy in their house. Me, I’m happy because I really feel I got my hands on a piece of French history. That was in April, if I remember correctly. In summer, another family situation in Savennières. In Savennières, because Jo had a tiny bit of Savennières, which was a fairly classic Savennières. And there another opportunity that’s a bit more unfortunate, in a family where there were two brothers, one of whom unfortunately died, and the other found himself really in a bind, with this big harvest coming, in volume. He went to see SAFER to say “you have to help me find takers for part of the vines, and people who also help me with this harvest, by taking part of the harvest.” We got along very well with this person. I think we gave him a good helping hand, and in exchange, we were able to get a foothold in the Savennières appellation. We don’t have a huge amount of vines, we have three hectares. And especially we managed to buy a tiny thing, called the clos des Ruchères. Which is a quite exceptional Savennières, at the foot of the Roche-aux-Moines, which has a foothold on the rock itself. That’s a small clos, so a small monopole, which we mix with its other Savennières, because we of course do parcel-by-parcel work. It’s a terroir we like a lot on the schists. That’s how, in six months, we were finally able to build up what is Domaine Belargus, that is, 24 hectares of vines dedicated to chenin. There’s only chenin. For listeners who don’t know the region, in the Loire we say “ch’nin.” 24 hectares of chenin and parcel-by-parcel work that allows expressing many nuances. Because actually, chenin is a bit like pinot noir, that is, they’re terroir transmitters. Chenin doesn’t have a specific taste. When you work well, when you work organic, even biodynamic, which is the direction we want to take, when you respect, when you have living soils and you harvest at proper maturity, very important notion, you have a grape that expresses the terroir it comes from. The terroir, that can be an exposure, North, South; it can be a slope, more or less steep; and it’s also subsoils. On Anjou Noir, we’re on what I’m used to calling a geological chaos. We’re on the primary era, on the Massif Armoricain, let’s say 500 million years. So from one parcel to another we have very different subsoils, which give wine profiles, in the aromatic sense, completely different. So we were able to build this whole. Objectively, if I’d taken a blank sheet, told myself “well, if I were dreaming,” I couldn’t have dreamed better, I think, in this area. I should perhaps explain the name of the estate, because I didn’t call it Château Massonnat. We had to find a name. There too it’s moments like that where it comes as an obvious choice. Actually, among the biodiversity we have on the coteau des Treilles, we also have a very complex geology. We notably have limestone lenses, which is very rare in a schist region. On these limestones, there’s a small flower that grows, Hippocrepis comosa, which is a small yellow flower, on which a small blue butterfly, called Bel-Argus, lays its eggs. And the Bel-Argus colonizes the coteau des Treilles. We sometimes see it on other slopes of the Layon, but on les Treilles is really where we see the most of it. It’s a beautiful little butterfly. I invite you to go see it on the internet: type “Bel-Argus,” you’ll see photos of a magnificent little blue butterfly. I told myself “it has to be that.” On one hand because the sound is beautiful, I found, and on the other hand because it says something about the beauty of nature, about the fragility of nature. When you walk on les Treilles, between May / June and end of September, you see this Bel-Argus. You see lots of other butterflies and insects, but the Bel-Argus, you notice it right away, with its small blue wings. So that’s how I chose to name the estate, and that’s how Domaine Belargus was born.
You wanted to talk about the transaction, well, it takes time, throughout 2018 we worked with Jo. I wasn’t yet the owner but we worked in trust, so we started buying back equipment, changing everything, the presses, the pumps, the vat room, to try to prepare as best as possible for the 2018 harvest that was coming and looked very good. There are validation steps with SAFER that are quite complicated. There, since I was direct with SAFER, who had the sale mandate for Jo, that made things easier, but it’s quite complicated. I can’t go into detail, but there are organizations in France that are or aren’t authorized to give operating permits, etc. And when you do all that, well, on September 5, 2018 we were able to sign at the notary the entire transaction, with all parties. Since there were a lot of things, there were ultimately three transactions: there was Jo’s, there were the Quarts-de-Chaume, there were the Savennières.
You sign everything at once?
Yes. So all that, it was prepared. That’s where my profession helped me, because I was supported by advisors who were used to vineyard transactions. September 5 we’re at the notary, and September 10 we have pruners in hand and we’re cutting this 2018 harvest, which we presented yesterday for the first time to the Parisian market. I often say the 2018 harvest, because our first vintage, 2018, was quite well noticed, people found that it was pretty good. So I think we generally succeeded. I always say “we did 2018, but in a rush. Imagine, you take a fire hose and you try to quench your thirst, you’re going to have a lot of trouble.” That was it, we were running everywhere. Plus, with what I was explaining about Savennières, we had to take more harvest than what we had ourselves, to help this person. We found ourselves doing a giant harvest, on a vintage that was still hot, so going very fast. And then there it is, we did it.
It must have taken you crazy time, to do all that: on one hand the preparation of the acquisition, but also the harvest? You must have slept very little, right?
Yes. In general, I’m still a hard worker. Since I chose… when I say “I” by the way, I should say “we,” because it’s a family decision too. We talked a lot with my wife, before I took action. Actually, we made the decision to do it knowing that private life would suffer, in the sense that all my free time goes to it. That is, evenings go to it, weekends go to it, and I don’t really take two / three week vacations anymore, it’s more vacation days I manage to slot into my professional calendar to be able to go to the estate. But it’s the price to pay for a passion, and it works. It allows me today to be fully active in Paris, and then to go to the estate regularly enough. The rest can be done at distance. I haven’t talked about a very important element, which was set up in 2018, with a part of work and a part of luck: it’s the constitution of the team. 24 hectares. I wanted an estate of a certain size to be able to set up the team. I, I still have my job, so I needed an autonomous team. Jo accompanied me. The idea was that he’d accompany me as a consultant, but the idea was that a team, that I’d choose, would be in charge of operations. So I built a team, and there it’s a bit like with the whole project. That is, I take on the North Face a bit. Rather than taking back the name of Jo’s estate, for example, which was called Pithon-Paillé, I wanted to create a new estate name, rather than just having his vines, I wanted to buy other vines. And on the team, in the end, rather than going for very experienced people, who would actually reassure me, well I told myself “no, I’m going to go for young people.” Actually, I went for very young people. I made notably two key recruitments. There are ten people on the estate. Five boys, five girls, I’m very proud of that. But there are two key people on the production side, who are Adrien Moreau, who’s cellar master, and Amaury Chartier, who’s vineyard manager. The average age of the whole team on the estate must be 27 or 28. Adrien, when I recruited him, wasn’t yet graduated. It’s obviously his first job. He had lots of experience, internships, in very prestigious estates, but it was a form of risk-taking, to take such young people. But their talent, both of them, their previous experiences, their vision of wine, they’re real wine enthusiasts, they came to these professions out of passion for the product, actually a team that’s very tight-knit, that’s extraordinary. I consider that I’m lucky to have a “dream team” at the head of Belargus. The way we work, I often summarize by saying it’s a bit like family estates, where you’re lucky to have the three generations represented. Me, it’s my estate, I manage it, I make the arbitrations, I give the directions, I decide ultimately, but the reality is that we talk all the time among ourselves. And I rely on Jo’s wisdom and experience, the generation above, and I rely of course on the energy and competence of Adrien, Amaury and the whole team, that is, the young people below. Actually, having these three generations, in my opinion, really allows us to aim high. That is, making great wines is complicated and requires a lot of things. Both a lot of commitment, energy, technicality, a lot of technicality, rigor, but also experience, perspective. We manage, I think, at Domaine Belargus, to make this intergenerational synthesis, which isn’t so easy to obtain, when you don’t have the chance to be a family estate for thirteen generations.
I can really understand it’s super important for you to have these people around you, of trust, of competence, of energy, on site. And indeed your relationship with Jo, you talked about it a little, but it sounds quite incredible, on one hand personally for you, because I think he must bring you a lot, and for his knowledge of wine, his local knowledge.
Indeed, even though I’ve learned a lot of things over the years, all the same, he has forty vintages behind him. Plus, he’s very open. One of the common points of the people on the whole team, in the adventure, is that we’re all very open-minded. For example, Adrien, who I recruited as cellar master, is an agricultural engineer with a DNO, so an oenologist. I rely heavily on oenologists, heavily, and Adrien is one of these oenologists who has the sensitivity for wine, who has the open-mindedness, ultimately who is always in search of something. With Jo, it’s a bit that, constantly we’ll discuss things he’s seen, that he’s encountered. He of course knows lots of people in the vineyards. He was one of the first to leave his region, he wandered all his life through the great French regions, also through the great vineyards of Europe. He fed off all that, and me, through my exchanges with him, I benefit from this experience, which isn’t reproducible.
Even for him, it must be super pleasant to be able to keep going with this second youth, and also to not see his work fly away.
Yes, I think it’s a bit of a second youth. Even though I have an aesthetic of wines that is mine, that isn’t necessarily the same as his completely, even though we took over in 2018 and he respects that enormously, of course, it’s the same general philosophy. That is, it’s terroir wines and the greatness of Anjou. He’s really a local. It’s making the wines from these terroirs shine to the level of rank they deserve, and not the way they’re perceived from afar. He has dedicated his life to that, and I’m following in his footsteps. There’s a dimension of the project too, which is important, which is the collective dimension. When I arrived, I’d been touring properties for a long time, I knew a few people, but also, what people understood quite quickly is that I wasn’t in a solitary project. Even though Belargus has fairly specific characteristics, it’s one of the many estates that are excellent. There are excellent winemakers, but really. For those who don’t know Anjou wines well, I invite you to taste the wines of all the winemakers of Savennières, all the winemakers in Anjou, there are gems everywhere. From the start, I clearly explained that my philosophy was to work collectively and to ultimately contribute to the recognition of this region. I really didn’t want Domaine Belargus to try to forge its own path alone, in a region that remains moderately perceived. I think that’s doomed to failure. Somewhere there’s a fairly bold bet I made in building this estate, which is that actually Anjou is at an inflection point in its history. It’s been more than twenty years since its great winemakers did the hardest part. They conquered the heart of the wine microcosm, who are the most demanding tasters. So the best importers, the best journalists, the best tasters, that’s it, they’ve understood, they’re convinced. And the inflection point, it’s the moment when, you don’t really see the difference, it’s subtle, we’re at this moment I think, where the market is starting to become aware of it. The market, that means the new restaurant that opens, it tells itself “ah darn, and in the Loire, what do I have? Ah yes, and I need to have great ones. The Loire isn’t necessarily the entry of the range, there are also very great wines. Maybe the most expensive wine in my cellar could be an Anjou wine. What if I found myself a great Savennières?” I think there are many weak signals for a little while in the market, that mean we’re at this inflection point where actually, Anjou and the Loire in general, but I think it’s particularly Anjou, is taking this place in the market. Quite simply because people are rediscovering this region. And there, I’d like to say a few words about this region. I myself discovered it. I knew it very little. But the least we can say is that I got interested in it, and now I’ve linked my destiny to this region. What I discovered is phenomenal. In the Loire, there are about 1000 kilometers of river, there are I think 78 appellations, so the Loire is very varied. But the Loire appellations, if I say Vouvray, Montlouis, Chinon, not to mention Muscadet, Sancerre, those are what we call mega-appellations, that is, they’re thousands of hectares each time. Now, when you zoom in, you come to Anjou, in the region where Domaine Belargus is, on the schists. The appellations are what? Savennières, 150 hectares; Chaumont premier cru, 80 hectares; Quarts-de-Chaume grand cru, 40 hectares; la Roche-aux-Moines, 22 hectares; la Coulée de Serrant, 7 hectares. Actually, it’s the place in the Loire where the definition of terroir, in the hierarchical sense, has been the most pushed. And maybe that’s also why I vibrated on this region, it’s that it’s really like Burgundy. It happened at the same time. La Coulée de Serrant, I think they’re at their 890th harvest. We’ll talk about the Quarts-de-Chaume appellation, it’s the 11th century, it’s a thousand years of history. And actually, the hierarchization of Anjou terroirs was done a long time ago. So after that, I opened a few history books. And I told myself “of course, of course.” In the 12th century, who is the duke of Anjou? It’s Henri II Plantagenêt. Henri II Plantagenêt is king of England. What we called the Angevin Empire goes from England, the top of England down to Scotland, and goes down almost to Spain. From that moment, Anjou wines acquire a renown that is a European renown. They’re served on tables in England. Then there are vicissitudes, a somewhat difficult medieval period. On the other hand, it picks up a bit in the 16th, but especially 17th, 18th, until the revolution, oh great era of Anjou wines, with the Dutch, who trade in them. The radiance of these wines was immense. What happened next is two / three centuries where everything was going to change. That’s what’s quite fascinating in this story, it’s that it had been immense from the start, and immediately Anjou wines were positioned I think at the highest level. What has happened in the past two centuries is just the opposite, in the past two / three centuries, let’s say since the French revolution. There were several movements. French revolution, the first movement is the revolutionaries who say “ah, careful! Great wines = Clergy + Aristocracy. We’re not doing well. Ordinary wines. Let’s make wines for the people.” The dichotomy between fine wines and ordinary wines, it underpins the evolution of French wines for centuries. At the time of the revolution there’s already a first step that’s triggered. Then, especially in the 19th century, the Phylloxera crisis. So there, the vineyard had to be replanted, following this crisis. There the question of grape variety choice arose. Actually, we have historical documents, the most recent that was published last year I believe, dates from 1804, it’s an inventory done by the prefect of Maine-et-Loire, around Chaptal, that records all the grape varieties. 1804, 80 to 90% of the Anjou vineyard is chenin blanc. It’s THE great variety. It’s documented, it’s the great variety. Now you advance the story, you look at what’s the variety mix of Anjou today? Chenin represents 19% of the variety mix. What happened in between? There was this Phylloxera crisis, the development of ordinary wines, and especially the two wars, which impoverished the country and forced the French vineyard to reinvent itself, in the 1950s/60s. As far as Anjou is concerned, the great invention of the time was Cabernet d’Anjou, a soft rosé, which sold very well. At the same time as Beaujolais Nouveau was being invented, in Beaujolais, well there it is, we found a solution to bring in cash. Really, I’m not criticizing what the winemakers of that generation did, because they needed it. But the fact is that these two centuries of history have completely trivialized the image of Anjou. Me, when I did my project and started telling people around me “that’s it, I bought my estate, it’s in Anjou,” people from the wine industry I knew told me “but you’re crazy. You could go anywhere in the Loire. Ok, the Loire, I get it. Not Anjou! It’s the only region you shouldn’t go to.” Anjou, people consider it’s low-end. It’s true that the Anjou appellation, on the other hand, is a regional appellation that’s gigantic. I find this contrast very interesting, between this history that has still proven today in the hierarchization of its terroirs, there are appellations that make up Anjou, and the trivialization that spread notably in the 20th century. My great conviction is that we’re quite simply reconnecting with the history of Anjou, and that we are going to be one of the estates, not the only one, but one of the estates that will try to give back its letters of nobility to this region. How to do it? By producing good wines. And by having a range of wines. I insist on this notion of range, I’d like to be very precise about something. The wines of Domaine Belargus are ambitious, and notably ambitious in terms of price. I’ve positioned them at the price level where the market will be in ten years I think. I think the market in ten years will value a complete range of wines in the Loire, and notably Anjou, as it does in other regions. If you look at any region, have fun, you’ll see the estates of the Jura, of Burgundy, of Côtes du Rhône, of Bordeaux, and you look at the difference between the cheapest wine of the estate, and the most expensive wine of the estate. And you’ll see factors of ten, sometimes twenty, etc. So there are real ranges. And people understand the notion of a range. Now you go to the Loire, notably in Anjou, including with the greatest winemakers who make extraordinary wines, between the cheapest and the most expensive, times two, times three, two and a half? That’s what’s unfair, it’s that there isn’t this price range that the market recognizes in Anjou. And so I don’t want all the wines to go up in price, that’s not my vision at all. I want wines at all prices. Because there are terroirs of all kinds. On the other hand, I want this region, legitimately, to recover its status as a region capable of producing great wines. I’m far from the only one. I even think there’s a collective being born. I was given responsibilities last year, which I accepted and it was perhaps a bit of a hazing. I was asked by the presidency of a thing called la Paulée d’Anjou, which is still called la Paulée d’Anjou. They’re only organic winemakers, and I consider that we, Anjou’s organic winemakers, can make it one of our instruments. Not a commercial instrument, we have salons for that which are very good. But an instrument that allows each year, at least once, to do an event where we attract professionals from around the world and we bring them to Anjou, and we make them discover. Last year we did an event that brought together more than 1500 people, only pros, from fifteen countries. During the day, we were at la Coulée de Serrant, so there are people who discovered this absolutely magical place. La Coulée de Serrant opened to the public. I invite everyone who loves wine even a little, to go see this place, feel this terroir. It was at la Coulée de Serrant. In the evening, we dined in a magnificent medieval hall in Angers, called les Greniers Saint-Jean. We had three Angevin chefs, each starred, who made us a starter, a main, a dessert. We had an exceptional moment. This collective of winemakers grew this year. We make a small nod to history, because until the Revolution, in the province of Anjou there’s Bourgueil. Today the perimeter of la Paulée d’Anjou is almost 90 winemakers, all organic, who come from the vineyards around Angers, like Domaine Belargus, vineyards around Saumur, what we call Anjou Blanc, and vineyards from Bourgueil. So, this collective, I think it’s one of the voices that will allow us to highlight this region, and again in all its diversity, that is, not just talk about wines: talk about landscapes, talk about agriculture, talk about gastronomy, in short, talk about this product of civilization that is wine.
We talked a bit about the appellations. You wanted to come back to the Quarts-de-Chaume appellation?
Yes, I think it deserves it. I feel quite privileged to have a small piece of this appellation. It’s a piece of French history. Where does the name of this appellation, Quarts-de-Chaume, come from? Chaume is a small hamlet, there are vines around. In the 11th century, the abbey of Ronceray, which is one of the abbeys of Angers, there are five abbeys in Angers, was a women’s abbey, so the nuns of the abbey owned these vines. They didn’t make the wine, the local lord, that is, la Guerche, la haute Guerche, made the wine on behalf of the abbey. According to the traditional medieval lease system, the best quarters of the harvest, so the best-located parcel actually, went to the Lord, which allowed him to ultimately pay the rent to the owner. What’s very interesting, in any case it fascinates me, is that this lease system, it’s very common in France. In France, there are many parcels called “les Quarts.” All the time, they’re parcels that are extremely well located, that is, if it’s on a hillside typically, it’s going to be the heart of the hillside. Obviously, lords liked having the best parcel. Quarts-de-Chaume is in a village called Rochefort-sur-Loire. In neighboring villages, there are parcels called “les Quarts.” There are some all over France, but there are also some in neighboring villages. And why did Quarts-de-Chaume, not only cross the centuries, but also become famous enough to become an appellation in its own right? That fascinates me. There are a thousand years of history that connect us to a very particular lease system, but that tell us the story of the small French people, all the same. That it became an appellation in its own right, I find that absolutely magical. We’re lucky to have parcels that are indeed at the historic heart. The famous house that’s today the house I left to the family that sold us the vines, that house was the wine cellar of the lords of la Guerche. It’s an extraordinary nod to history, that is, the wine of Chaume was made on the parcel that was the most beautiful, exposed due south, les Quarts, it was made at this precise place, around which we have our vines today. It’s the kind of thing that makes me dream. One of the challenges we have is to get these wines recognized. The sweet wines are known, more than known. The only Loire appellation that has grand cru status was given for sweet wines. But actually, there too we just need to look at the texts, 18th, 19th, there are many harvest reports, and we see clearly that depending on the year, the wines were dry, off-dry, sweet. It was nature that chose, whether or not to have a late season allowing to make off-dry or sweet wines, which are wines that are quite difficult to produce. And then, the invention of sugar, the chaptalization process, progressively, was probably a weakness of the appellation’s winemakers at a moment in history when sweet wines were selling very well, had the weakness to break the appellation rules. They weren’t the only ones. But there are other appellations in the Loire that resisted, Vouvray, Montlouis, even Savennières resisted, and these are appellations that can be made dry or sweet, you just have to indicate it on the label. On Quarts-de-Chaume, they restricted the rules by saying “no, Quarts-de-Chaume is necessarily sweet.” It’s an era that fortunately is over, even though it’s a great terroir for sweet wines, where winemakers were chaptalizing. That is, on a terroir that’s incredible for making sweet wines, they were adding sugar, the years when they couldn’t make any, and they were making sweet wines with sugar, with high yields, so they were putting in lots of sulfur. You know, the sweet wine that people don’t like anymore because it gives them headaches, the one that’s well sweetened and that gives headaches, those are sweet wines, fortunately like we don’t make today. The appellation was banned, but those are the ones that killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. I was elected this year with another winemaker, Marie Guégniard, of Domaine de la Bergerie, for the presidency of this appellation, Quarts-de-Chaume. One of our battles in the coming years will be precisely to explain that this place is unique, that it produces chenin wines either dry or sweet. We’ll find a way. This isn’t the format to go into the detail of these issues, but we’re going to find the way to get great dry wines from the Quarts-de-Chaume terroir recognized, which is a very original terroir. All the people who taste say “ah, but I didn’t know we made wines like this in the Loire.” It’s a very particular terroir. We have a cuvée, which is a cuvée we make in fairly large volume, called Ronceray, which precisely tells a bit this story of these terroirs. After that, we do parcel-by-parcel work. They’re wines that have a very particular personality, in dry. And so there it is, we’re going to find the means in the coming years, to get this appellation talked about, and to explain the dry and sweet wines.
We talked about it a bit, with the story of the purchase of all the parcels, of all the estates you were able to make, but can you still present a bit your range, in a few words?
Yes. We essentially make dry wines on the estate. Great years we’ve also made sweet wines. All these wines are made with a terroir approach, that is, a parcel approach. We have in total almost fifteen cuvées. Just in dry, we have nine. It’s a bit of a walk through these landscapes of Anjou Noir. We identified the parcels that seemed to me most characteristic, differentiated. There are three vineyard clusters I’ll talk about. I’ll start with Savennières. There are two Savennières. One called Gaudrets, which comes from a parcel called les Gaudrets, at the top of the village, it’s really a classic Savennières. It’s eolian sands on the surface and schists in depth, that makes Savennières that are rather tense, lively, in this style. And then we have this small clos des Ruchères: there we make a Savennières that’s much more structured, much more… an adjective I hate but that’s understandable, mineral, that is, the vines are planted on the rock. It’s a wine that has much more structure, aging potential and complexity. Then, on the Quarts-de-Chaume cluster, we make four cuvées. The Ronceray cuvée is our blended cuvée from all the Quarts-de-Chaume parcels. And then we make three parcel cuvées which are les Quarts, les Roueres, le Veau: the trilogy of three parcels that were in the original decree creating the appellation. They touch each other, these parcels, but their subsoil is completely different, and we have three wines with different profiles. We like the idea of making them as a trilogy, like that, so people get interested in the subsoil of a vineyard. Because they’re the same age, but it gives very different wines. And then, on Jo’s historic vineyard, on the Coteaux du Layon, we make two cuvées today, which face each other. They’re two parcels that face each other. One is the coteau des Treilles, which we discussed at length. The other is les Bonnes Blanches. They face each other. It’s funny, one is due south, on the Treilles side, and the other is due north, on schists, cold soils, and they’re almost opposite cuvées. Even though we’re a stone’s throw away, there’s only the Layon, which is this small river, that separates these two parcels, there’s almost three weeks difference in maturity between the two. So you can imagine the difference in style of wines that come from these two parcels. There you go, those are our dry cuvées. We also have a cuvée, which is an entry cuvée into the universe of the estate, that we simply call Anjou Noir, which comes from all the somewhat orphan parcels, which are very interesting parcels, that aren’t made parcel-by-parcel, that’s an introductory cuvée to Belargus wines. And then I was saying, we make off-dry and sweet wines, only great years, and parcel-by-parcel.
What’s next for Belargus?
Work. It’s like in business in general, there’s nothing that replaces work. So we have to work everywhere. We work in the vineyard, we have a vineyard that’s relatively heterogeneous, not everything is in good condition. We work in the cellar, we need to refine our methods, our vinification methods, our precision in aging. And then we have to work on commerce. There’s one of my mentors in the wine world, who one day gave me an equation, I’ll deliver a secret, a magic equation. He told me one day, at the time we were on formal terms: “Ivan, know that making great wines is very, very, very, very, very difficult. In the vineyard, in biodynamics, vinification, etc. If ever one day you manage to make a great wine, you’ll have done 10% of the way. Actually, great wines are everywhere. So you’ll have 90% left. Already 40% of the way will be making yourself noticed. That’s the communication aspect. That is, if you don’t manage to communicate and to emerge, for people to know you exist, you won’t exist. When you’ve done that, you’ll only have done 50% of the way. You’ll have left the most important, which is commerce, distribution. Because actually, the only judge of peace is the moment when the bottle is bought, then opened, and where the person says ‘ah, this wine is good, and one day I’m going to buy more.’ Actually, that’s where the real work is.” The other dimension we have left is the commercial work. It’s getting Belargus tasted, explaining our philosophy, which is very specific, our terroirs, which are very unknown. And this work is going to be long. It’s begun today, but rather internationally. It’s sad, but foreigners are much more open to the world of wines than the French. They don’t care about “it’s called Anjou, I don’t care. What’s in the bottle?” So today, our first market, 80% of sales, is Sweden, Norway, Germany, California. They’re people who went there, despite Covid. Because we’re launching Belargus at the same time as a global pandemic. The last time was the Spanish flu after all. We hadn’t planned, in the business plan I hadn’t planned that there would be a global pandemic. But we adapt. It’s the export markets today that are the first to go to Domaine Belargus. And of course in France, because I absolutely wanted my wines to be distributed in France, well, we’re starting. We have the chance already to be distributed in some very beautiful establishments in Paris and the regions. And we’re going to do it. That’s where the bulk of the work is going to be, that is, getting the wines tasted and explaining what we can do in Anjou and getting people interested in our chenins.
Indeed, yesterday we were discussing distribution a bit with people from your team and I was hearing that the Northern European countries were super represented. I believe the first pallet of Belargus left for Norway or Sweden.
Absolutely. Sweden is already on its second order this year.
I have three big questions left that are quite traditional in this podcast. The first is, do you have a wine book to recommend?
So in this case, yes, very easy. Especially since its author was here yesterday, he did me the friendship of coming to the Domaine Belargus launch. It’s the latest book by Jacky Rigaux. You may have read books, works by Jacky Rigaux, he wrote about twenty on Burgundy. He’s a great intellectual, who became fascinated by the wine world, who had the chance to mingle with great winemakers, like Henri Jayer, and he’s releasing a book, right now. It’s not yet in bookstores, but I think within two weeks it’ll be in bookstores. It’s called “Le monde du vin aujourd’hui” [The World of Wine Today]. Jacky’s vision, which is a vision I completely identify with, on wines of place, is very well explained and detailed. It’s a book that, in my opinion, reads quite quickly and that I warmly recommend to understand what’s happening in the world of fine wines. I think someone like Jacky has a very precise eye.
Do you have a recent favorite tasting?
I have trouble choosing wines. On the other hand, there’s a project I haven’t talked about and that I really care about: I had the chance a few years ago to be able to acquire a hectare of vines in Champagne, with a young winemaker who had found the means to buy these vines, who obviously didn’t have the money, but had found the means. A great guy, we built together a micro estate, with the ambition of converting his vines to biodynamics, which we’re doing, and then to release parcel wines, and real wines. The first cuvée we’re releasing is going to be a Coteaux Champenois, white. So a still wine that’s a blanc de noir, since our vines are in the Vallée de la Marne, so it’s meunier. I got very interested in white Coteaux Champenois, which is very rare actually. In my permanent collection quest, I managed to find five or six producers who made white Coteaux Champenois, and on this, I won’t say the names of those who didn’t impress me, there are some whose wines I didn’t like, it’s not easy to make. On the other hand, there’s one that blew me away, it’s a cuvée from Drappier, called Crémant Nature, that I found remarkable. I told myself “wow.” Because we also make champagnes but they’re going to take years of aging. For our Coteaux Champenois, we have to try to release something that’s as interesting as this Crémant Nature cuvée, which is hard to find, but worth it.
To finish, who’s the next person I should interview?
Jacky Rigaux, certainly. And if you want someone in the wine world, I can put you in touch with someone who is one of my former associates, who has a profile somewhat similar to mine, and who has just taken the leap too, after years of research, by taking over Domaine Terrebrune, in Bandol, his name is Jean D’Arthuys, I think he too has found a gem. It’s a very interesting estate that will be worth following.
