Winestudy in the Loire

I am in Europe. I flew from Chicago to Paris on Thursday and drove into the center of France to administer the vows at the wedding of two friends in Savennières, in the heart of winegrowing region of the Loire. At the wedding, I met other winemakers, very serious people who make small amounts of wine with the greatest of care. All of them work fields that belong to their families; all feel that they are engaged in very traditional work, extending not just a profession but a way of life that reaches back dozens of centuries. All of the people that I met work in a somewhat unconventional way, even if they think of it as traditional. They make very serious wines, not anti-establishment gestures, yet they all eschew the use of sulfur in the winery and farm their vineyards organically, with the use of herbicide unimaginable. They have all figured out how to hold to this and produce wines of absolutely classical clarity, grace, proportion, and deep complexity. There are wines produced nearby that are made also by serious people but who achieve very different results; wines that are for me to some degree caricatures of other wines, not efforts of gravity—and this is no doubt fine with them.

On Sunday my friend Robert had prevailed on one of the brides to reach out to a local winemaker who works very quietly and is completely reclusive in his habits. He is not easy to see, he has no desire to engage in promotion. We would have had no hope of reaching him ourselves, but she is a local kid, and somehow got us an appointment. Sunday at 5. "Show up early. Do not bring your normal expectations."

We pulled into a narrow drive in the completely walled town of Brézé. There are no freestanding houses on the street; instead, unbroken walls made from the local tufa; with some houses set into the walls and opening directly onto the street, and other set back, with small, in-town, walled estates surrounding the houses, and ornate gates barring the way. Everything seems very old—perhaps from before the revolution. There is a large and famous castle across the street, and it seems quite grand, but everything on our side of the street seems to be not only old, but in a mild state of decline and disrepair. At the end of our grass and gravel drive, a small chateau, shuttered, and with the air of having been abandoned. The land around it is wild and overgrown. I think of The Fall of the House of Usher, of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

We are met by a man, tall, thin, graceful, who greets us warmly and suddenly we know that we are already inside something very special, something unforeseeable. "Xavier," he introduces himself and listens carefully to our names. He walks us around the corner of the chateau to a hole in the ground, underneath some kind of wild tree with leaves like a bay, but the growth habit of large weed. We discern stone steps overgrown with grass and moss, and wait, while he disappears further into the earth. He returns with a box of wine glasses like any others, and four bottles unlabeled, all previously opened, with their corks jammed back into them.

All of the bottles have been open for 15 days, he says.

The first bottle is a white wine from 2004. He makes only two wines, one red, one white. The white, 100% Chenin. Six years in barrel before bottling, then, in the case of this wine, four more years before release. Robert asks about skin contact (Xavier speaks no English, I translate as best as I can). No skin contact. We discuss the press regime and fermentation for 30 minutes. In great detail. He uses an old champagne press with a capacity of about 500 liters—very small, and exactly the same capacity as our presses at Tenbrink. A typical day during the white harvest has the following rhythm: wake up, harvest as much fruit as the press will hold, bring it back to the winery ("where do you do the work?" I ask, pointing to the overgrown yard and the complete absence of what we would call a crush pad. "Where you can," he says with a smile). Load the press. Begin pressing. Go past midnight. Adjust the pressure. Assess. If all seems good, go home. Sleep, wake, return to the winery, release the pressure, break up the grapes ("Whole cluster?" "Yes. We do not crush or destem anything"), re-apply pressure, go harvest fruit, return, unload the press, begin the cycle again. They work with about 3 vineyards typically but make 3-4 passes in each vineyard. There could be a dozen days of pressing; sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. They break up the cake of compressed grapes only once and gently. He wants as little friction and trituration as possible. There is no breaking up of the fruit on the way into the press or in the press as we do ("makes the fermentation too fast," he explains. "Oh yes, how fast? what counts as a rapid fermentation for you?" "Three weeks." "Ah, that is rapid. What is the optimal time for you?" "A few months … A year." "Ah yes, we call those 'French Fermenations.'" He smiles.)

They do not protect the juice at any stage from oxygen; they do not settle. They do not make press fractions. In general, they consolidate fermentations; there is no multiplication of differences. At the beginning of his winemaking, he used a little SO2. Now, no sulfur is used at any point.

Xavier has the aim of extracting what he calls "matière" from the grapes. He means something like a complex of tannins, phenolics, and aromatic compounds. More on this below. But he does not want sensible tannins, or roughness, or what he calls "rusticité."

The wine ferments and ages in neutral oak vessels of various sizes. Originally all 220 liter, now many 400 liter. There is no stirring ever, no racking until bottling, topping only every few months if at all. I get the impression that he tops from other lots of younger wines, but I am not sure. Nothing is ever inoculated; the winery in which he has made most of his wine was originally created in the 11th century. As far as he knows, commercial yeasts have never been used in it; nonetheless he has no illusions about the source of his microbiology. He does everything he can to cultivate the microbiology of his vineyard, and to translate as much of it as possible to the winery—but, if I understand him correctly, the thinks that this comes in in the composition of the grapes, not as microbial passengers on the skin of the grapes. There is no hot water or soap or other disinfectants in the winery. Originally, he burnt sulfur mined from the earth in the barrels but he does this no longer.

This discussion, as I said, took about 30 minutes and was easy and casual. It was much more a discussion than an interview. Xavier listened carefully to my account of how we work at Scholium and I took pains to draw precise distinctions between his methods and ours. None of this meant anything to him. He clearly has his own paths ("The wine must reflect the 'mentalité'—the thinking—of the winemaker"; but more on this too) and, as far I could tell, was only interested to hear how we worked because he likes other human beings, not because he cares how anyone else makes wine. When I quoted him above on the "thinking of the winemaker," he clearly did not mean something like it was his job to impose his thinking on the grapes—rather, there is no way for the thinking—the whole thinking, metaphysical, physical, religious, sentimental—no way for this NOT to affect the wine—so better to be clear and conscious about it.

When we taste, he is very eager for our impressions, our reactions. He watches our faces, especially our eyes, carefully. He is clearly proud of how old the wines are: 2004—it was so fresh; I knew that it was not a 2016 from barrel, but perhaps a 2015? No, 2004; bottled in 2010. Totally fresh, punchy, dense but light on its feet at once.

2002. Bottled in 2008. Equally fresh. Showing the beginning of what you could call bottle age. Then, he pulls out and pours a wine that is slightly golden by comparison—1999. "The first wine that I ever made." We cannot believe that he is sharing a bottle with us.

This wine too is absolutely fresh, vigorous, even electric. The wine is perhaps more viscous than the others, and more golden to the eye—but not tired or even maturing in the mouth. The wines are complete and developed—and in this sense, mature—but there is no sense that the first two wines have aged at all, and it us hard to place the bottles in time in any way. They are, in this respect transcendental, which is difficult for wine—but they have dates. 1999 was the first year that I made wine too; it is hard for such a wine not to seem historical in this respect. How can a winemaker's first wine not be historical?

We taste a red wine from 2004 and another early white, from 2001, that finished primary fermentation in bottle (by surprise). Both wines were very good, even great in some way—but it was so hard to come back and down from the 1999, the wine of origin. He calls all of the wines: "Genèse"—Genesis. The winery is the Gardens of Emeralds; the wines are Genesis White and Genesis Red.

All of the wines have intensity—particularly in what you might call "minerality." They are saline and have the body and density that comes from fruit—but they do not taste or smell of fruit. Nor do they smell of yeast, in spite of their long lees contact. Nor do they seem oxidized. Even the 1999, opened 15 days ago, was fresh and yellow—no more golden than many Chenins only a couple of years old.

You could say that the wines are rocky—but you must somehow also mean that they are graceful. You could point to nuts and nut skins, and high-acid, young champagne, but you would have to be careful not to simplify too much. It is also worth saying that the wines taste and smell reduced, but that this is not an overwhelming sensation; and that there is no trace of VA at all, or, at most, perhaps one senses some acetic in the mouth, but nothing else, and certainly nothing acetate-y. The wines do not have the markers of wines that stand out as "natural" and seem utterly classical in spite of their unconventional origins.

Lastly, the wines have no typicity for me. I cannot identify the whites as Chenin (though they are not so far from what Eben Sadie sometimes accomplishes by rather different means). I cannot place them as Loire wines. This does not bother Xavier at all. He is in fact proud of this. Even though he is a super careful farmer, he is not interested in revealing or somehow representing the vineyards. There is clearly an unbroken continuity for him between the vines and the wine, but he nonetheless does not feel that he respects this continuity by seeking typicity, or by making single vineyard wines. Neither holds any interest for him.

He suggests, with both pride and mischief in his eyes, that the wines would be hard to identify in a blind tasting. When I agree and tell him that the 1999 reminds me of old first growth Bordeaux, he is clearly pleased—not because he cares at all about old Bordeaux, but because my mind roamed.

There is a little more magic to mention: the invisible cellar, the shuttered chateau. But I do not want to emphasize this. Xavier does not play any of this up: like the vineyards, all of this disappears. There is no show: only wine. He does not even make a show of his methods; he never mentions his own devotion; he never draws distinctions between his way of working and his neighbors'. He does not celebrate or elevate what he does; he is utterly matter of fact. He never mentions "purity" or any other value. His only point of pride, if I read him right, is his wine's relation to time. His only theory, insofar as I could grasp, is related to what he calls "matière"—"matter." His labels have alchemical references (see note below); I think that he means something old-fashioned and metaphysical by this. He does not just mean "matter" or even something like information. He talks about his farming being devoted to translating matter from the the field (not just the soil) to the grapes, and his pressing being devoted to translating the matter from the grapes to the juice. The density of this wine is due to this attention to matter—and also the complexity, I think. But this means that "matière" is not just some concentration of molecules, but some kind of system, with architecture, proportion, interrelation. For what else is complexity? His matter, I think, is something more like spirit or soul—not necessarily in the Christian sense, but in a way that Aristotle would understand.

Soul, of course, brings up the question of spirituality and devotion. I thought of his pressing all night and then getting up the morning to harvest fruit. I thought how differently we work at Scholium. For us winemaking is intensely intellectual and sensual—you know that—but it is also intensely athletic in a way that we love. We pride ourselves in a very American way on how fast we can get the job done well. One cannot help but call Xavier's work "spiritual," and I mean this only in a good way, not as a stereotype or a caricature. You could only call our work "spiritual" in a very narrow but perhaps equally beautiful way: the spirituality of Huck Finn, a very American spirituality.

It was wonderful and important for me to encounter this difference and to reflect on it.

Would we—me, Alex, Brenna, Koko, would any of us make better wines if we sat with the press all night? I don't think so—but for us to do that and not simply be aping a quiet wizard in the Loire, for us to do that, we would have to change to our deepest metaphysical core. In this respect, what this amazing visit emphasized is that, in spite of my 1000 careful words above, winemaking is not fundamentally about technique, protocol, regime or even about care. It is about decisions and stances that reach to one's roots.

These two excellent reports by Betrand Celce are very helpful, especially on farming, and contain amazing details and photographs about Xavier's caves. I tried not to rely on them at all and to base my report only on our conversation, but I know that I was influenced (and informed) by having read these.

It is also worth noting how far ahead of the curve Betrand was: they date from 2011.

A note on Xavier's labels: The typography is mostly fantastic (except for mise-en-bouteille information) and involves some straightforward imitations of Roman epigraphy in a circle at the top. (We will read this in a moment.) The rest of the words are written in the hand-drawn letters of a fantastic alphabet, the majority of which interweave alchemical symbols with the Modern Latin letters. The words in the circle are a quotation from the Latin Vulgate translation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans: hora est jam nos de somno surgere—"now is the time to wake up from our slumber." The allusions to alchemy are very interesting to me and not surprising. What is more unexpected is a quotation from the Vulgate. Xavier's thinking is simple in its commitment and focus; but complex in what you might call its metaphysical underpinnings. Pay attention to every gesture.