For the 39th episode of the Wine Makers Show, your wine podcast, we headed to Chinon to meet Nicolas Grosbois. We invite you to discover this estate with savory wines, made with love and as a family. With that, we’ll leave you with our conversation with Nicolas Grosbois.
Hello Nicolas. Thanks for welcoming us to Domaine Nicolas Grosbois, near Chinon. Can you start by introducing yourself?
Thanks to you for coming. Nicolas Grosbois, hello. I’m a winemaker-peasant in the Chinon appellation, in the small village of Panzoult exactly, with my brother Sylvain who joined us a few years ago. I had a fairly classic path, son of winemaker, son of peasant, son of arboriculturist at the start. I followed the curriculum of viticultural schools, BEP, BTA, BTS. At the end of my BTS, I had the chance to be able to travel a bit, accumulate interesting experiences for less than 10 years. I was always grabbed in the guts by the place where we are today, called Le Pressoir, in Chinon, with the fierce desire to work with Cabernet Franc. In 2005/2006, life brought me back. And then, our parents started telling us they were getting tired. They wanted to pass the torch. All that happened quite simply over the course of life. Then I met Stéphanie, with whom I live today. I settled in 2008. That’s why we’re here today, at Le Pressoir.
You confessed earlier that you weren’t excellent at school, before dedicating yourself to wine. Did you always know you wanted to make wine? Was it written for you?
No, not at all. On the other hand I grew up in a village, running in the countryside with friends, always touching a bit of everything. At the time our parents were arboriculturists, in a small village along the Loire, that lived from fishing. It was the end of artisanal river fishing. We were growing up in the orchards, pears and apples, a bit on the fly. This country life where during school holidays you climb on tractors, on apple carts. You live with a team that comes to do the harvests, the thinning by hand, at the time, because chemical thinning didn’t exist. You grow up with all that and you find your happiness there. And then, life brought us, finally, as a family. The Grosbois family. We’re four: Jacques and Jocelyne, our parents, and Sylvain. End of 9th grade, son of peasant, resourceful in the soul because handymen, jack of all trades, not knowing what to do, our parents take over the wine domaine and we with Sylvain we launch into viticultural schools. We start quite simply with a BEP, because at the end of 9th grade it wasn’t a question, given our school level, of going to 10th grade. We were at a time when manual work was still less considered than today. We’re talking about the end of the 1980s, where you could hardly explain to our guidance counselor that we wanted to go to an agricultural high school as a boarding student in Anjou because it pleased us, because the view of the tractor pleased us, because spending our days in the fields pleased us, building a life like that pleased us. But for these people, it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible because it was failure. You became a hick. There you go, end of the 1980s. It changes a bit, it started changing in the 1990s. It changes and it’s good news. But that’s how we started. Gently, I was told “you start with the dead-end”. My first exam in my first year of BEP was the CAP. I got my CAP in viticulture-oenology. I did a BEP, it went well. It went well because everything lit up, you find meaning in lots of things. You find meaning in math class, in science class, in French class a bit too. Foreign language classes, you don’t yet have awareness that the world is vast and you can cross it, but for that you have to be a bit equipped in linguistics, so you don’t really lean into it but it starts to tickle you. And then revelations, people you meet, everything goes well. A school level that suddenly passes the average of 13s or 14s. Little personal pride too, because you realize you find meaning in your life. A family pride, because despite everything, when you come back with report cards that are good, at that age I was 17, you’re happy to come home. When you have report cards that don’t exceed an 8 average, you don’t have the same weekend. Then it was the first boarding schools. You leave the whole week, you come back on the weekend, you start emancipating yourself, finding your place as a young adult in the new world. And it goes: BTA, so professional baccalaureate viticulture-oenology, still in the same school. More and more fascinating. I leave for BTS in alternation. Encounters, revelations, a world I didn’t know at all: viticulture, which at the time wasn’t at all the same in Bourgogne as in the Loire. I didn’t have access to that viticulture which was already underway in the Loire. Because that’s also it, as you go along your path, you have to manage to open doors, push them, kick them in, provoke luck, and advance like that, gently. That’s a bit our story. Sylvain, my brother, followed the same curriculum, but he left much earlier to work abroad. So me, end of BTS, I find myself with the obligation to do military service. I’d opted to be a submariner or go work in the vine of the Foreign Legion, in the Rhône. That couldn’t happen. Either you committed yourself to a circuit you liked in the army, which wasn’t obvious, or you signed CDIs, which allowed deferring your commitment. And there, end of BTS, there’s a Loire merchant who trusts me, Dominique Amirault, who offers me to take care of 40 hectares in the Corbières, in the South of France with Henri Duval, who’s an important fellow traveler for me too. I’m 22 years old, I buy a red ZX, I go down to the Corbières, I rent my apartment, life begins. These people tell me: “You have everything to do. You have the vines, but you have nothing else. On the other hand, we give you a million francs.” At the time, with a million francs, you buy tractors, it’s Christmas. I do my shopping to equip the domaine, we restructure the domaine, we try to do something interesting with it. We vinify it in Limoux, with a man called Mr. Astruc, with whom I learned a lot too. Finally, the adventure ends after 3 years for internal and family reasons related to the merchant. For good and loyal services, these people tell me: “listen, we’ll do an economic layoff for you, that way you can take advantage of unemployment a bit, you can live your life a bit, and that gives you a few months to breathe before you find something else.” There, I join my brother in Chile, south of Santiago. Beautiful experience. I spend a few months there, I come back to France to work again with Henri Duval and with a man called Jacques Beaujeau, with whom I learned a lot about wine aging, in Saumur Champigny, you’ll have noticed, with the fierce desire to get closer to Cabernet Franc. At that time, the seed had germinated. We’re in a quite astonishing place and I always wanted to come back. Coming to Saumur Champigny was the opportunity to come work with Cabernet Franc, to understand them. Second CDI. I’m still with this Sword of Damocles of national service hanging over me. I do two or three years at Domaine de la Perruche, with these people. One fine morning, I lived in Saumur at the time, I’m driving on the Loire dyke, and suddenly, on the radio, at 8 in the morning, an announcement: from one day to the next, Chirac decided to stop military service. The announcement is made, national service ends. Two months after, I hand in my resignation. I no longer have this Sword of Damocles. I leave for Oregon, I do a harvest in Oregon. Revelation. Extraordinary people. Another way of vinifying, another way of envisioning the grape, the grape trade, the organization of company structures. There I have a second flame that lights up. The first was the schools and the company. The second is this trip abroad that then takes me to a second experience in Australia, then in New Zealand, working Pinot Noirs in small tanks, understanding the effects of maceration. For a Chinon winemaker, understanding the extraction and maceration of grapes, when you make Cabernet Franc, isn’t trivial, it’s very important. I leave New Zealand again, I’d found a job in India, north of Bombay, to make wine. The Indian government had decided, in the 1990s, to favor the development of the vine, because culturally it seemed important to them, because next to that, mostly, they distilled rice and potato to make alcohol. Badly distilled, that does damage. Potatoes and rice, when you have national food problems, you prefer to tell yourself it’s better to eat them rather than distill them, and it’s better to make wine, which will be between 12 and 13 degrees of alcohol, even if it’s 14 degrees, there will be another relationship to alcohol and therefore another relationship to the construction of civilization. My words aren’t well found, but you understand, it’s another social lubricant to drink wine that’s 12 degrees, that you’ve made next to your home, than to receive 2 liters of badly distilled potato alcohol, that are 55 or 60 degrees, that you buy at the local Seven Eleven, because they’re stuffed with it. And so the dream: at that time I was 28, they offered me a pretty salary, to spend more than 6 months and a day outside French territory, plane tickets paid, that is, you don’t pay taxes. We go for it. They were offering me the equivalent of 15,000/20,000 francs at the time, that’s not bad. You have no expenses, everything’s paid, it’s royal. This man had made his fortune and had set up a vineyard in India. He’d come here to Chinon because very interested, he went to the bottom of things. A family construction: he wanted to see how it had been done, with whom to work, how to build his domaine. He’d come there, it had gone super well. We part saying “you send me the plane tickets and then I’ll go.” Two months before leaving, in 2005, I was pruning in the Clos du Noyer with Jacques. I call Ambir, I tell him “listen, I haven’t received the tickets”. He tells me “it’s normal. - How is it normal? - Well you’re not coming anymore. - Ah OK. But tell me why? - In your place I took Australians, I got along well with them.” I tell him: “you could have told me before”. He tells me: “no, it’s your life, you’re not made to come to India, it’s not your karma.” We’d gotten along well, good rapport with the guy, I tell him without animosity: “next time you pass through Chinon, come have a drink at home, that would please me.” It’s life, finally maybe he was right, he maybe felt something I hadn’t understood. For two/three days, you don’t sleep very well. Finally, you tell yourself he’s maybe not wrong, your life is to stay there. He’d maybe felt it, not you, he had another age, another sensitivity. During 2005 I decide to stay here. My parents were rather satisfied because they were on another rhythm, they were starting to get tired a bit with age coming, which is normal. Here’s the beginning of the adventure, in 2005 I take over the domaine. We work first together for two years, we collaborate, because there’s still a transmission. You don’t arrive in a family domaine saying “you take everything and go to hell”. It’s not possible. It doesn’t happen easily, but it happens anyway. It happens by saying lots of things, you’d still spent 10 years before, in your young adult life, where you lived other things with other people, so coming home in a family context isn’t always easy, but it goes well. In 2008, I buy back the shares of Jacques and Jocelyne, our parents. And I leave like that, gently, at the head of the domaine.
Concerning your very first experience, when you’re entrusted with the keys of 40 hectares, in the Minervois, what feeling does that give you when you’re told “here’s 40 hectares, a million francs, manage”? You must have felt almost invincible and at the same time facing an enormous task?
Invincible no, because we were two working 40 hectares. You tell yourself “you’re going to have to move your butt to prune everything in winter”. How to tell you… I believe that if you say yes to this kind of challenge and you haven’t understood what awaits you, either you weren’t trained, or you’re crazy. Now I grew up in that, I still have some experience, I did my BTS in alternation in a vineyard in the Hautes Côtes de Nuits, that’s important. Pruning all winter I knew what it was; spending my nights treating because the idea was to go organic at the time, I knew what it was. I had awareness of the task that awaited me. I was excited. I was 25, you move mountains. You don’t sleep, you sleep two hours, you continue, you go for it, you’re excited, you’re happy. And then frankly honored. Beyond the task that awaits you, you tell yourself “wow, that’s cool”. You just got out, there are these two guys who come to see you, who trust you, who tell you “well go for it my guy, show us you’re capable”. That’s how it starts. A real beautiful experience that taught me lots of things. The relationship with the world of wine industry, at that time I worked for the wine industrialists; the relationship to matter; the company relationship, I was in a big structure where I dealt with oenologists who understood the sensitivity of grape and had a will to coddle each vine, but there were administrative, commercial and production directors above them, who told them “but we don’t care, we want the wine to taste like this”. As much as when we see each other today around a glass of Chinon, it’s the soil, it’s the vine that commands; as much there, there’s a salesperson who, to feed any network in France or Europe or the world, tells you “well there you go, the wine I need is this, you manage, I need that”. Finally, you find yourself in a whole company mechanism where you’re just asked to make disembodied juices. It’s the kilo-degree relationship. That is, you have to make the maximum kilos with the maximum degrees. The qualitative criterion is that. You find yourself facing these people, in these factories, who tell you “you have to put this, you have to put that, you have to put that, to get this”. You make disembodied juice. It was a real beautiful first experience, because despite everything, you can talk about biodynamic wines, natural wines, etc., the best way not to access junk food, is to know it. My children are 8 and 10 years old, they’re at the age of wanting to taste junk food, because when you pass in front of brands we won’t talk about, they tell you “ah dad, that would be good”. And then once a year you go anyway, because you have to show them, explain to them why. To enter, to go work in those factories made me become aware of quite a few things. When you find yourself, next to that, facing winemakers who put much more matter in their wines, much more attention and who make you understand that the extraction of a grape is what you take out of the skin, of your pulp, and it’s up to you to taste them, to understand them to do what you want. It’s up to you to do what you want, it’s an interpretation of your terroir and a melody you put in the bottle. It makes you understand that if you want to earn money to brew volume and brew millions of francs at the time, you have to stay in that system, with a certain security, but you go to the factory you know. I respect the factory, but screwing bolts all day wasn’t really the idea. Or you tell yourself there’s perhaps better elsewhere. Then life made it that this experience ended. There were other interesting adventures behind.
Concerning your experience in Oregon, you mentioned that you saw another way of seeing things, of making wine, of selling it, distributing it, marketing it, etc. Can you come back on this other way? I think we’re in the 1990s when you’re there. What do you discover on site? Is it a moment when they’re a step ahead of French wine, in any case on certain aspects? And in the meantime have we caught up or do we still have to be inspired by certain things?
Let’s recontextualize. Mid-1990s, you’re in France, you’ve only seen French vineyards. We’re talking about a time that still exists unfortunately, where you met people who were 40, 50, 60 years old. Once again, when you’re 25, 40 years old seems far. I’m 45 today. These people tell you “you’ll see my guy, when you’re my age you’ll have understood”. And you grow up with that. A bit like in viticultural schools, at no point were we taught that you could make wine without herbicide and that it could be an emergency solution. Like you’re going to use an antibiotic because you need it, but if you need this antibiotic it’s maybe because you didn’t take care of yourself well before, or you didn’t pay attention to put your scarf on. We were in this culture of automatic product. I believe we talk enough about it right now, everyone’s aware of that, we won’t come back to it for ages. But in general viticultural mentality, that was it, you had to wait until you had 25 or 30 years of experience to have the level and understand what was happening. I take my train ticket. At the time I’d worked with a governmental association, which was very interesting, it bothers me not to remember it, that allowed you to leave for exchanges in other countries. It concerned the whole agricultural environment, whether you were a cereal grower, farmer or nurseryman, you could go work in other countries and you had the working holiday visa for Australia, but also visas for the United States. I find a job in Oregon, a bit by chance, in a domaine called Adelsheim, behind Portland. I start the vinifications there. At that time I was rich with my experience in Chile. As I told you at the very beginning of our conversation, languages, when you’re in viticultural high school, isn’t really your jam. I arrive there, I babble a bit in Spanish and not at all in English. I take the plane, I fall in front of American customs officers, friendly as a prison door. Next to that, a guy who passes you quickly, and you find yourself embarked. I find myself in Portland where I didn’t understand English at all. The winemaker of Adelsheim, I didn’t catch a word. But I spoke Spanish, and in the United States, the people who do the work are the Mexicans. And I get along well with the Mexicans. Because necessarily we understand each other, they were happy to find a guy with whom they could chat a bit. There, it stings the oenologist a bit who’d done great studies in France then in the United States. He puts me a bit aside. There’s an extraordinary domaine that was hosted at that time at Adelsheim, called Shea Vineyards. Dick Shea was the owner. There was Chris Mazepink, who was an oenologist, who tells me “come with me, I speak a bit of Spanish, we’ll work a bit together”. At that moment, I find myself with this guy, in front of 10 barrels of Chardonnay. I’ll always remember it. We have 10 barrels of Chardonnay and we didn’t agree. The guy tells me “we have to do it like this”. I tell him “no, I don’t agree, we have to do it like this”. He tells me “you know what, we’ll do 5 barrels as you want and 5 barrels as I want”. I tell him “you’re crazy, it’s important all the same, it’s your juice. It’s not even yours by the way, it’s Dick’s”. Then the guy tells me “wait, I didn’t bring you here for nothing. I made you cross the Atlantic so you teach me something”. Brilliant. You tell yourself damn. You don’t need to wait 40 years to know and to exchange. And there, the world belongs to you, there are no more problems, you go for it. You tell yourself it’s great. There, my big experience.
Who was right between the two of you?
Ah, that’s the big question. Fundamentally the matter was the same, the Chardonnay was about the same. We fell on two different characters of the same individual. Separately, it was nice, well there, no more. And it was super by blending the two. Finally, we were both right. It’s what we said earlier about the Cabernet Franc tanks: even though I did the blend with Sylvain three months ago now, each tank brought its characteristic in relation to its temperature, etc. At Dick’s, with Chris, it was exactly that, we found ourselves with two individuals and it’s the collective work of a global reflection, of the openness of this guy that means we made a super wine. You understand it has to build collectively. And there, big break. You tell yourself “but damn, in Europe over there, they haven’t understood”. That’s what travels brought me, this understanding of the collective. We think what we want about it. American style, there’s positive that we don’t have at home. That’s what travels taught me. It’s what I told you earlier, after that you go anywhere when you have awareness of that. After that it rolls. Technically, what I learned with Chris, on Pinot Noirs, is that we could do anything. The guy was cracked. We rented refrigerated trucks and brought them down to -10°C/-15°C. I’d seen cellars, there, where they froze grapes to vinify them throughout the year because they didn’t have the capacity to vinify everything, their cellar wasn’t big enough. So the guys had rented big freezers, they froze the grapes, and all year they vinified like that. Tac, they were having fun. It was quite astonishing. And you learn that everything is possible. One morning, he got up, he wanted to do cryo-extraction. Dick, the owner, says “well go for it, it’s maybe a good idea”. But that’s also it, it’s telling yourself “don’t stop, it’s maybe a good idea”. Dick tells you “well the risk for me is what? 500 kilos of grapes and 300 kilos of dry ice?” Well, ecologically it’s not the best. Finally we mixed dry ice with the grape, it was an ice cube, it took two weeks to defrost, it made a horrible soup at the end. But we tried lots of things like that. We worked a lot on macerations, this capacity to understand extraction, this capacity of the skin to give you the tannins, the bitters that build the wine, all this construction of wine. There I learned a lot a lot, really. After Australia, it was a bit of a return to the factory where you find yourself with three / four tanks following each other on the same truck, with grapes that have been on the road for three days, that come from 2,000 km, and that you unload with a big pump to make juice and you go to the “chemical room” to blend all that. It was a return to another state of mind. And then my last experience was Pegasus Bay, on the South Island of New Zealand. And there too, big slap. Same: “what are you capable of doing, my guy? - Well, I’m capable of doing this, this, this. - OK, you’ll show me.” And then “OK, I saw you knew how. Well you’ll take the Pinot Noirs. Then you manage. On the other hand, you’ll do reporting on maceration times, on tannin extraction.” I remember, I’d built them a bar, the “extracting wine bar,” something like that, on pallets. Every day we tasted the different tanks, at different stages, we took samples, before, after. I learned a lot from them, it was a super beautiful experience. That’s where you learn all that, this slightly crazy side, this unbridled side.
You then come back to Chinon, you do a few years with your parents, you buy back your shares from them. It’s not free, it’s not a simple transmission, you become the real new owner of the domaine. Was that important for you? To officially become new owner?
No, not really. I’m still lucky because my parents sell me back the shares. We’re talking about company shares. To go a bit more into detail, you don’t buy back the associated current accounts, and you’re not asked to buy back the lands, but to rent them, which is normal. It’s silly but it gives you an administrative status and finally, even if you were already taking decisions the previous year, the banker considers you differently. On paper it’s you who’s responsible. But it doesn’t really change. You’re not in charge of a piece of paper, you’re in charge of what’s by the window, of 40 hectares of land, 8 hectares of vines, that’s your real charge. The rest isn’t very, very important. To answer you completely, I still had the chance to have parents who asked me to prove myself, who didn’t stay old fools holding the helm until their retirement. They left quickly, they watched me make my mistakes. Fortunately, I want to tell you. It’s a super beautiful action, it allowed me at that moment to learn lots of things. And without them I couldn’t have, it wasn’t possible. Wanting to do what we do today and going to see an investor at the time, even with my experience, the guy would have told me “but you’re crazy, it’s not possible”.
You do these three/four first years with your parents here, then it’s you completely at the helm. Can you tell me a bit more about what you do here? About your different wines, about polyculture?
I leave in 2008. 8.80 hectares of vines. Lands at the time that were exploited in cereals by a local peasant. We’re starting our second year in organic, because I managed to convince my parents. We start with that. I start being interested a bit in biodynamics at that moment, because you taste wines here and there, you find it good, you tell yourself “why not”. I start committing in 2009 in biodynamics. You start reading a bit around biodynamics, and you start realizing that some and others, the great thinkers of biodynamics say that monoculture is a bit the rape of nature. It makes no sense. So you tell yourself “why am I continuing?” And at the same time it’s logical. The idea is that you position the human in a virtuous and lasting system, that will be able to spend 200/300 years without leaving an important trace, allowing future generations to recover a bit of nature in good condition and live there. So you say “you have 8 hectares of vines, and below after the vines, at the edge of the poplars, 40 hectares of cereals in which there are still insecticides and pesticides. Your business doesn’t hold up, it’s not logical.” You can’t go see your wine merchant or receive an individual making the apology of Steiner and Maria Thun, talking to him about stars and having behind that 50 hectares of land in chemistry. So I said “OK, we’re going to stop biodynamics”. I call Demeter. Demeter is important for me, it’s like certificates, appellations, it’s something that puts a frame that’s recognized and readable for everyone. It’s an interesting debate at the moment and it’s important. I leave Demeter, and then I take back the cereals in organic. We start cultivating them. There, we’re watched a bit by colleagues saying “but what’s he doing with his cereals, it’s never going to grow”. And then it grows. It grows well. Finally I do my cereals with my little winemaker tractor. 30 hectares at the time. We pass the prairie parts to organic too, and I start buying Limousine cows. When you’re in Chinon, you grow up at the edge of the Vienne, so you come from Limousin. I buy Limousines, logically. The late Jacques Puisais tells me “Nicolas, if you want to buy cows, you have to know your land comes from Limousin. The Vienne is black and dark, like the land, that’s why the cow is red and black, it’s made for that place. So you’re not going to go look for Charolais which comes from the Loire part, you come from the West part of the Massif Central, and not East, like the Charolais, so you take Limousine.” I take 4 Limousines, and you start experiences finally without knowing. And that’s the big problem of our countryside today, there’s no more inheritance of know-how. There were still animals at home in the 1980s, but there hadn’t been the transmission of these farms as was still done in the 1970s where there were vines, necessarily, because it’s part of all our European countrysides, and that’s what makes the joy of living, let’s not hide it. But next to that you had to eat well, so you had to do cereals, you had to do animals. So there was a know-how of the owner, of the peasant or his team that was transmitted to the next generation, and like that for a very long time. And that, we’d lost. There was a gap between the 1970s and now where finally at Grosbois we don’t know how to lead a herd of cows, we don’t know how to lead cereals without our famous chemical artifices, we know even less how to make a vegetable garden. As much as you have dreams of making cooking and knowing how to cut an onion correctly, but making a leek grow is like a vine cep, it doesn’t happen overnight and it’s not because the moon is beautiful that the leek will grow well. So you have to relearn all that. At the time you tell yourself you go for it, you’re going to make mistakes, you know it, but you have a vision, you know that in 10/15 years you want to go there. That’s why on our bottles, with Sylvain, we put on our back label “winemakers in polyculture”, because for us it’s important to mark it, and it’s marked to do it: congruence too, you say what you do and you do what you say. Today we’re on the verge of achieving something quite interesting. You saw, we have our herd, we have our market gardening that’s starting, we’re capable of making pretty cereals, and we’re reconstituting the will to make an autonomous farm, that’s capable of making its manure and vegetables. But not vegetables to fill our three baskets. Us, if we make vegetables, it’ll be 10 tons of potatoes, 10 tons of carrots and 15 tons of leeks. When you’re in Chinon, you’re not very far from Tours. The Tours politicians, fortunately, and I hope they’ll keep their word, committed to what they pompously call the Tours Metropolis to feed all its schools with organic vegetables. That’s brilliant. But it’ll only be a political announcement if there aren’t people who do organic. Because the Tours Metropolis, if you want to feed all the schools, you need 25 tons of leeks per day, 200 days of the year. So with Sylvain we register in that, we’ll specialize. The peasant profession is still despite everything some specializations. We’ll specialize according to our terroirs. In the bottom of the valley we have rather slightly more sandy terroirs so that will more support the potato, the carrot, the leeks, at the root, because there are no stones, so you’ll make beautiful roots. And we’ll specialize in that to feed the schools. The culmination would be that we can feed the village school. Today we have our four children who are at the village school and who eat food prepared by a robot in a big factory and delivered in a big fridge once a day, and it doesn’t look very appetizing, as we say at home. The culmination will be that, managing to offer meat and vegetables consistently to local schools. We’re a generation for whom it won’t change much. If at least the little ones we can give them good vegetables and good meat, so they remember it and grow up in good health, that’s the most important.
Can you tell us a bit more about your wines? You have different wines that correspond to different parcels. Can you tell us a bit more?
Pressoir Panzoult, we’re on the right bank of the Vienne, on argilo-sandy terroirs, with a bit of clay but a lot of sand. We’re located on a place called Le Pressoir. At the same time I’m looking out the window, because there are several small parcels, it’s 12 parcels that are on a gentle slope, we don’t really have hillsides at home. And a constitution of a cultivation block that dates from the 15th/16th century, rather end of 16th century for the culmination of a fortified farm that was never consolidated. Consolidating is grouping several parcels to make only one. Those were the famous agrarian laws of the 1970s initiated by Mr. Pisani. It was never consolidated, so we find ourselves with 15 parcels next to each other, that are positioned according to their soil qualities, their structures and their soil depths. As time goes on, we came to dispose different vines. So we have different ages of vines. To answer your question, on Domaine Grosbois we make, in this whole constellation of parcels, a cuvée called Gabare: Cabernets Francs, 100%. The Chinon appellation is Cabernets Francs. We make a cuvée called Gabare, which we want, with Sylvain, ripe, generous, pulpy, dense, fresh, natural obviously. It’s hand-harvested, it ferments with its own yeasts. We put a bit of sulfur at bottling, just so it holds well and we’re not disappointed after 4 or 5 years. Then we make another cuvée called Clos du Noyer, which is a bit our pride. It was the first cuvée my parents let me make in 2005, it’s my very, very first wine. A cuvée called Clotûre, in the middle of the domaine, which is a parcel that was planted in 1910. Another called Montet which is on a limestone slab, east of the village, that was entrusted to me in operation 5 years ago. On the domaine, we have four main cuvées, for which the ambition is to manage to make Cabernets Francs that are pulpy, generous, balanced, digestible. Once again, as Puisais said: “it has to have the face of the place and the guts of the winemaker”. You can want to change the face of the place but you won’t manage. It’s a notion well of ours, of humans, to change the face of the place, but as we often say in agronomy: “when you pass at the end of a field, there’s a whole herd that works underneath”. There are bovines underneath, they’re all the earthworms, micro-organisms and fungi. So that you won’t change. You can bring the potash, the magnesia, the manure that you want, you won’t change the very structure of your soil because it’s a mass that’s so enormous. On 10 centimeters it’s 10,000 tons. So it’s not the three/four tons you’re going to bring back that will change. It’s important because it’s the very nature of “it’s the face of the place”. After, “the guts of winemakers”, it’s their capacity, their abnegation to get up in the morning, to go see how their vine is going, their land, and to know how to listen to it. That’s the most important. It’s a bit the genesis of the story, it’s what we learned with Sylvain abroad, it’s knowing how to listen to what’s happening, knowing how to listen to others and knowing how to listen to the plant, which is the base of biodynamics. That’s why biodynamics is interesting, because it’s observation, listening. This capacity to go work even on Sunday if you have to go, because you know that on Monday you’re going to take a soaking and that it’ll be impracticable, and that if you don’t do it there behind, there’s a mass of impacts that’s so important that it can be detrimental to your vintage, your cuvée or your parcel, and finally to the perpetuity of your company, your team, everything you tried to build around it. You go for it, you get up in the morning and it stays a pleasure. It has to stay a pleasure. That also means you have a partner who understands that and follows you in the delirium too. It’s still the story of a life, the story of a family. So you know, you have to be capable of listening to your soils, spending time on it and transmitting it to your team.
Furthermore, you have a merchant activity that allows you to make other wines, notably in Gaillac?
In the first place in Chinon, because it’s pretty to say “I make small yields, I try to make pretty wines”, but it’s an investment that’s phenomenal, it’s masses of money you swallow up for 15 years. It’s been 15 years that I’ve been settled. I had an appointment last night with my accountant and we said “in 5 / 6 years we’ll be settled in roughly”. So you need 20 years, between the moment you have the vision, when you start working your first stocks, until the moment you can tell yourself that there, you have a harvest in the stock, a harvest in the cellar and a harvest in the bank, which is going to allow you to get through difficult moments. You need 20 years. 20 years, with all your hiccups, because we had years of frost, etc. But to do that, when you think a bit, you tell yourself you can’t get there. How do you do to get there? That’s a bit the question. You tell yourself you’re not going to stop there, otherwise you’re going to bolt bolts at the bolt factory. You tell yourself “I need a way to find money”. Either you have family or friends who have money. That’s not the case. Either you tell yourself “I need a business behind to find money, to reassure my banker and show him that on one side I lose some, on the other side I earn some, and when I no longer lose any on one side, it’ll go well”. So you have to do merchant. How to do merchant? Before 2008, before taking back my parents’ shares, since I couldn’t take back their shares from them, I still had to have a status, so I set up a small SARL that at the time bought them their racks to sell box wine. I started like that. The merchant company Nicolas Grosbois was born like that. Today, to come back to your question, this merchant part is important at home since it represents almost twice the volume of what we produce at the domaine. It’s essential in the economic balance and the perpetuity of the whole. We do sourcing in Chinon, with a colleague called Alexandre Moreau, who’s in organic conversion, where we go pick up grapes. We vinify it at his place and we make La Cuisine de ma Mère. It’s our first merchant cuvée in Chinon. To tell you everything, when there are Gabares parcels that don’t hold up, they also go in La Cuisine de ma Mère. So in La Cuisine de ma Mère there are also parcels of Domaine Grosbois. It’s the practical side. Everything goes well, until 2016. I found grapes a bit everywhere, tac, I lived my life, it was good. Then 2016, we take frost. First year of frost for me, experience of non-production, 90% frosted. So you tell yourself “what do I do?” I no longer have grapes, I no longer have wine. So you live in the countryside, you’re in Panzoult, you tell yourself “too bad, you don’t go on vacation, it’s a bit vacation every day, that won’t change the mass”. To eat, you’ll do a vegetable garden, etc. Except behind that, for 10 years, you’ve built behind a network that needs you to always be a bit there. My distributor or wine merchant friends tell me “you should still manage to make a bit of wine, one way or another. First, it would be good for you, and then it would allow you to keep your tiny, tiny, tiny place on the market, because it allows the consumer not to forget you.” And then 2016, there’s an important movement of Loire winemakers. The whole Loire had frozen, like a big part of France if I’m not saying nonsense, who said “we’re going to go look for grapes elsewhere”. My first jobs were going to look for grapes in other regions, so that, I knew how to do. We do the tour of France at that moment, I take different appointments, in different regions with friends, and I call two Gaillac winemakers called Florent Plageoles and Laurent Cazottes. I tell them: “do you not know guys who make grapes that we could buy, we’d make wine from it.” And there, they tell me: “well yes, we have two / three friends, you can go see them”. I land in the Southwest, I didn’t know it at all. Gaillac. There’s no road that takes you to Gaillac. And then I land in Gaillac, with the two friends and a guy called Olivier Jean. And Olivier Jean, “well listen, yes I do have a bit of grapes, and I have a cellar, then we manage to get along well”. Finally, I enter his little hut which was his tasting cellar. I’d entered to buy 60 hectos. I leave, I tell him: “we’ll end with 600 hectos”. Which was at the time roughly what I produced. He looks at me with slightly sparkling eyes, he tells me: “we have to see each other again”. Three weeks later, I go back to see him, and the adventure begins. From our loss in 2016, this completely catastrophic year of frost, it was an extraordinary adventure. I land in a country, Gaillac, Southwest, with admirable people, who need us too. We need them. The guy has 40 hectares in organic, he harvested at the time by machine, I tell him “can you harvest by hand?” He tells me “why not”. And bam, we launch our adventure on Duras Braucol bases, that I didn’t know at all; Merlot, Syrah, a bit more standard, grape varieties that you cross in your experience a bit here and there. And then, we go for it. That’s what I told you, at the time my little partner, my little car wasn’t capable of going there, so I take the TGV and leave on expedition. All the people who bought Chinon from me told me “you’re a bit crazy, all the same. Do you know that Gaillac doesn’t sell?” Fortunately, it’s more in vogue, because it’s brilliant, it’s totally deserved, the terroirs are extraordinary, the wines too, and the people too. At the time, I was told “what are you going to do in Gaillac? You’re going to make us big-bottomed stuff”. And then finally we make macerations like we make here, short macerations, like we talked about in the cellar. And then I have my importer in Canada taste the tank, I have it tasted in France, here and there: the guys tell me “damn, it’s good”. What luck. Everyone takes some and I sell my 600 hectos in 6 months. It saves my hide. I remember my Gaillac friends who told me: “it’s not Gaillac. It’s Gaillac, but it’s heavy Gaillac, you’ve taken out all the matter.” Since we did very short macerations, for them you’ve taken out all the matter, it’s not Gaillac. “But it’s good anyway.” There, it launches, it’s brilliant, Nicolas Grosbois, in his little merchant business, makes Gaillac at that moment. 2017 arrives, we take a hit of frost in Chinon, we lose 30%. My market sellers, as we vulgarly say in the jargon, I tell them “Gaillac, I’ll maybe stop.” They tell me “Grosbois, you’re cute, but there it’s done, we sell some, the line is open, you go back. Plus, you’ve frozen a bit, you’re not bothering us, you go back once, and if next year you don’t want to go back it’ll be your problem, but we’ve launched the sauce.” Since they’re pragmatic, they tell me “we’ve also invested in this wine, so let me breathe a bit before putting Chinon back in the pipes for us.” And then it continues to advance. There, a bit like my experience in Oregon where finally the field of possibilities is opening, you tell yourself “but finally, if they accept that I make Gaillac, why wouldn’t I do something else?” We quickly make Bourgogne, other Chinons, and today a Côte du Tarn white. It’s exciting, they’re beautiful experiences. There’s a part of Domaine Grosbois, this family side, which for us with Sylvain is the fundamental base that built us, which is what we’ll certainly transmit to our children and that we can’t destroy, that we can’t touch, because it’s what we were given. It’s peasant, but it’s also our construction. It’s keeping what was given to you at least, and valuing it, putting it forward to give it back better than it was given to you. And then alongside you’ll have fun with this merchant side but which is very positive for me. It’s not a bad word, “merchant”, it’s the opportunity for people who have trouble staying in place and who have the desire to be rooted at home because you build your family on site, but at the same time a small entrepreneurial desire because you were born like that. And merchant is brilliant. With a friend we make a bit of Côtes du Rhône, you go everywhere. It allows you to accumulate tastes, experiences, different fermentations, different extractions. You come back to Chinon, it readjusts you a bit, it’s really formative and it makes you grow. For all the people who want to settle, it’s so obvious: you take a very small parcel, you take 2 hectares, and alongside you go buy grapes from a winemaker where you work, you do it honestly, you remunerate him well, you buy his kilos of grapes well, he’s happy, you’re happy because it limits you in risk, it’s great. You have to do that, because it allows gently starting a beautiful adventure. That, you see, is the modern version, in my opinion, of French viticulture as it must be built today, versus the new world. We have our appellations on which we must especially not hit because it’s the founding stone. We can talk about it for hours. The appellation is the reason why we’re talking face to face today. It’s the whole construction of what we know today, you mustn’t spit on it. But next to that, we have to manage to attach a modern version of the company and the domaine, and merchant for that is brilliant.
You work today with your brother, who joined you along the way, after a few years here.
Three years, yes.
How does it go, working between brothers?
It’s like working with your parents. The luck I have is that I already had partners too, on the Azay le Rideau domaine, so I don’t work alone. And then we had other experiences, Sylvain too. As much, when you have two peasants who’ve always worked on their farm together, you put them next to each other or you bring their farms together, often it’s a bit complicated. But we learned each, one and the other, to work with teams and finally to know that we can’t do everything, we can’t allow ourselves everything. Rich in that, I’ll tell you frankly that it’s not easy every day, but there are more days when it goes well than it doesn’t. Sylvain has a good constitution, I have a character that’s sometimes a bit angular. He knows where he’s arriving, I know what I owe him, because without him we couldn’t do what we do today. We’ll see each other in 10 years. Since he just arrived, he’s taking his marks in the team, and that’s nice. So globally it goes well, but we’ll see each other in 10 years. You see what I mean, there we’re finishing the wedding nights. When we have 10/15 years of experience together, we’ll have had time to get tired of it, to fight, or to live happily.
Wine tourism, that’s something you’re starting here. You were telling me about different projects. Do you want to tell me a bit more?
That, that’s a bit a result of Covid. Because 2008 I settle, I find myself at the head of a small domaine where people bought the bottle 5 or 6 francs, at the time; we set up other cultivation methods, other vinification methods; quickly your cost price goes to 7 or 8 francs, I was never very good at math, but if you want to make a bit of money you have to sell a bit more expensive, so you’re at 10 bucks. And 10 francs, at the time, when you sold a bottle at that price, it wasn’t so easy. I’m telling you nonsense, it wasn’t 10 francs, it was 20 francs. The liter of young vines in Chinon, at the time was 15 francs, and old vines was 25 francs. But the cost price was 20 bucks quite quickly, so you had to sell a bottle for at least 30 or 35 francs to be able to continue running the business. And 35 francs, a bottle of Chinon, well you had to get up in the morning to sell it to individuals, to people who came to see you. So quickly I stopped selling to individuals and I launched into traveling a bit, I sold bottles with distributors, also a bit for export. It worked well and so, I no longer had anyone who came to the domaine. To answer your question, wine tourism, I quickly stopped because for me it wasn’t possible. And then I couldn’t do everything, I was alone. There’s Bruno who joined me a bit after, who’s still there, who works in the vines. But either you spend your life in the cellar and you don’t get out anymore. Quickly I left with professional sales: wine merchants, restaurateurs and export distribution. Everything’s going well. Then Covid arrives. A year ago. You can no longer fly, you can no longer leave. You can cross France but it’s complicated. The restaurants are closed. The periods when they’re open they want to work so much that they don’t need to see you, because that’s still time for them. Plus they already have stocks, they don’t need novelties. So you tell yourself you’ll maybe have to reinvent the system. And then you tell yourself especially that finally, by staying there, we take better care of our domaine, we take better care of our team, and the wine continues to sell despite everything. It’s not as virulent as before Covid, but it still turns. You tell yourself finally that rather than going to carry the bottle to the four corners of the world, shouldn’t you have the four corners of the world come to you? Because we have a beautiful place, a beautiful environment. And that’s how with Sylvain, for a year, we want to bring people back to us. So doing the trolley-pushing of wine tourism, that doesn’t interest me at all. Sylvain neither. On the other hand, with our friends from Pain Vin, telling ourselves that we build, I don’t like the term, but that we build a tourism product where we offer an experience to people who come spend a night or two, who come work with us in the morning, do a bit of vegetable garden, take care of the cows, take care of the pigs in the afternoon, come pull wood. Coming to pull wood in winter is a good experience: you understand why your bottle is worth between 10 and 20 bucks for nice entry-level wines. I think after you put it in perspective a bit. At the same time, it’s a beautiful experience, it’s showing what you do, saying what you do and doing what you say. So we’re building this little project to make people come back to us, to finally develop this term wine tourism. Wine is also this brilliant side where you still have quite a few friends who do music, culture, so you tell yourself “well why wouldn’t we do aperitif-concerts?” Because my friends from Gaillac, they do aperitif-concerts all summer and the Albi people come, they drink shots and that makes things turn. Plus, it’s the party. So we’re going to try to do concerts, to bring people in, to move less. The genesis of the thing is a bit that. Finally we tell ourselves “we’re well here”. We’ll launch into wine tourism with pleasure.
I have three questions left to ask you. The first: do you have a recent favorite tasting?
Complicated question. Listen, my last beautiful tasting that I did was at our friend Paul Henry Pellé’s, in his small cellar, where we tasted old vintages that dated from his father, his grandfather and what he had. Nice whites with a bit of age, from different terroirs. That was it.
Do you have a wine book to recommend to me?
We did a weekend two weeks ago, as a family by the sea. In the rental where we were, there was the book by François-Régis Gaudry on cooking in France: “On va déguster la France”. I bought it since. He talks about wine, he talks about dishes, it’s super well illustrated, it’s digestible. It’s a book that talks about wines, that talks about terroirs, that talks about food, so it doesn’t completely answer your question. But my last pleasure was that, and I stayed plugged into it all weekend because it was a treat. I ended up making a mackerel marinade, which was appreciated. I took myself for a chef, it was my pleasure of the weekend, two weeks ago.
Buy this book
Finally, my last question, do you have a person to recommend for the next episodes of this podcast?
I have a good friend, I think he’d go well behind your microphone, with whom you could also have a good laugh. It’s François Crochet, in Sancerre, in Bue. Bue is a space of village of intractable Gauls, and François is a character with whom you could have fun, and who has lots of things to say. In the Loire, a few days ago, we lost a friend called Stéphanie Caslot, to whom we’re paying lots of tributes right now. I take advantage a bit because she was someone who made great Cabernets Francs. 41 years old. It’s a bit of a drama for Cabernet Franc, because she’s someone who did beautiful things. We wish lots of courage to her family, to her partner, to continue the road and continue to delight us with the beautiful Bourgueil from the Caslot family.
