Meeting Michel Chapoutier: At the heart of the game

"Fac et spera" (do and hope) is the motto of the Maison Chapoutier. Why this choice?

Oh, c’est très ancien et cela remonte à l’arrière-grand-père. Je crois qu’il voulait parler de la notion de vin de garde. Au XIX < E > e < > siècle, l’hermitage était parmi les vins les plus chers de France, au même prix que les grands de Bourgogne et j’espère que cela sera de nouveau le cas un jour (rires).

 

Burgundy… I heard you say that this northern part of the Valley of Rhône was somewhat under Burgundian influence, which surprised me greatly…

The shape of the bottle, Burgundian barrels... And besides, winegrowers from the northern Rhône Valley who want to work with barrel sellers from Bordeaux or the South-West have resinous, mediocre results. We realize that we have a much better understanding of our terroirs by working, both in viticulture and vinification, in the Burgundian way than in the Bordeaux spirit. We're also very close to our land, like Burgundy. There's a deep sense of agriculture here, in the winegrowers, in the local workforce, which you find in the Ardèche and throughout the Massif Central, in these poor, difficult lands.

 

Are you much more winemakers than oenologists?

That's for sure! The winemaker makes the height of the ladder and the oenologist climbs the steps. The winemaker creates the potential-quality and the oenologist simply transforms it. What's more, we have great geological diversity here, and working with parcels and climates makes real sense! In fact, I defend the principle of premier crus in the northern Rhône Valley. How can you expect a young winegrower to cope with the colossal investments required to work on hillsides if he can't be better remunerated through a classification system? Impossible! It's clear that on historic hillsides, quality is superior, and I'd add that many great terroirs have not yet been replanted since phylloxera. In Burgundy, what hasn't been replanted is second-rate, but not here! Many areas have not been replanted because it's too expensive, so we have a unique potential for development.

Recently, you've been reclaiming abandoned land, such as in the Saint-Joseph area of Tournon-sur-Rhône, at considerable expense and work. Is this profitable in the short term, or rather an investment in the future of both the company and the region?

Maxime Chapoutier: From Mauves to Saint-Jean-de-Muzols, we are in the heart of the historical, high-quality sectors of the appellation Saint Joseph and this work were relevant within a framework of premier cru Except in AOC Saint-Joseph, where the revision of the area of appellation It traumatized many people; in Côte-Rôtie, Crozes-Hermitage, the younger generation and established winemakers are rather convinced of the need to move towards Premier Cru wines.

 

I recently heard you explain that we would have to reinvent red wines, which are currently suffering from the crisis in many French regions, Bordeaux, the south of France, and beyond. Rhône …while sparkling and white wines are doing better. What do you mean?

It's said that people don't drink red wines anymore, but look at the market for pinot noir from Alsace; there aren't enough of it, and when I see the prices of Jura trousseaux! When France Agrimer finances restructuring, perhaps priority should be given to grape varieties that don't produce these 14-15° wines that nobody wants anymore.

 

You also cite examples of certain red wines from Alsace or the Loire Valley served on ice, which work well. But it's still hard to imagine a Hermitage, a Côte-Rôtie, or a Gevrey-Chambertin served on ice…

Light, fruity "party-wines", as in Beaujolais, have suffered greatly from the prevailing snobbery, and we need to give these wines their rightful place. Of course, you can't serve a Hermitage over ice...

 

Snobbery… You even explain that wine has become trapped “in a suicidal snobbery”. What do you mean by that?

When someone tells me, "I like wine, but I don't know anything about it," I reply, "You don't need to be a gynecologist to make love" (laughs). If some people feel uncomfortable, it's because we've dressed wine up, relegating it to a kind of pompous Parisianism. No one says, even in a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, "I like to eat, but I don't know anything about it." I think we've tried too hard to get people into our technical, codified discourse and not enough into the pleasure of it.

 

What do you do at Chapoutier to make your hermitages accessible and understandable?

We try to serve them at the table. Wine should be paired with food, and we should work hand in hand with our friends in the restaurant trade.

The Valley of Rhône seems to be lagging behind on the subject of wine tourism, which is nevertheless an essential gateway for raising public awareness of vineyards and terroirs. How do you explain this?

I'm going to speak as President of "Vignoble et Découverte". On a national level, the industry lost interest and made the mistake of delegating the job to tourism organizations. We've fallen behind. We need to get back on track and professionalize the process. Sommellerie saved the restaurant business when it realized that by hiring people to sell the right wines with the right dishes, they could increase their sales. We need to do the same with the cellars and estates, where knowledgeable people, trained to our standards, will sell wine, but above, all provide visitors with an experience.

Secondly, the wine industry needs to join forces with others. What do you find in the heart of Australian or Californian vineyards? Antique shops, art galleries... We need to create this synergy in France, in our wine-producing villages. Finally, given the multiple taxes that exist in France, wine tourism needs to become a quality tourism, even a tourism of excellence, and we need to establish a hierarchy of wineries in the same way as in the restaurant business.

 

Q: Let's talk a little about the style of the wines. We noticed during Discoveries in the Valley of Rhône By 2025, the style of your wines will be fresher today than it was yesterday, in rouge as in blanc In rouge by making greater use of whole-cluster fermentation, in blanc This is also where it's perhaps even more spectacular. It still means that winemakers are adapting to market demands…

Maxime Chapoutier: It's an adaptation to new consumer expectations, but also to the climate, which is forcing us to change our practices. While it was sometimes difficult in the 1980s and 1990s to achieve good ripeness and concentrated wines, that's no longer the case.

Michel Chapoutier: As early as the 1980s, I decided to convert to organic farming and to select individual plots to get the best possible snapshot of the terroir each year. Terroir encompasses the interplay of soil and climate/weather, and if the year is cooler, it shouldn't be altered in any way. Our signature should be in one corner of the landscape, not everywhere. AOC That's it, which doesn't prevent us from adapting to changes, and it's even more of a necessity for regional appellations, which are the true lifeblood of each wine region. We told our suppliers: guys, you have to stop making Côtes-du- rhône At 14.5% ABV, nobody wants to drink it anymore. It took two years to get it down to 13%, and that's not easy. Thirty years ago, to avoid losing concentration, you couldn't filter or fin the wine. Today, the wines are so rich that we have to go back to fining and filtration. Whole-cluster fermentation allows us to lower the final alcohol level by 0.5%, which is good, but I think we also need to address the... question Water. Why not imagine, with traceability to back it up, that if five hectoliters of water per hectare, for example, have evaporated during maturation to reach good phenolic maturity, we could give some of that water back to the wine?

 

You have been practicing organic viticulture since 1991. You therefore have some perspective, and is organic farming a solution to address global warming and achieve better balance in wines?

The vines are more resilient, acidity is better, and the epigenetic capacity of the vines to adapt is impressive! If we look at two vintages that are fairly comparable in terms of weather, 2003 and 2020, the wines have nothing in common. The 2003s are often cooked and disappointing, whereas the 2020s are much fresher. Let's not forget that Syrah from California and Australia come from Hermitage, and have adapted to a much warmer climate than that of the northern Rhône Valley. There's still room for improvement.

 

And these pre-Phylloxera Syrah vines found at the top of the hill in the L'Ermite cuvée are a treasurs. What are you doing to preserve this plant heritage?

Maxime Chapoutier: We have created a conservatory maison from the Syrah grapes from which our massal selections are made.

Michel Chapoutier: The problem is that these old plants are heavily infected with viruses and we're gradually losing them. So, perhaps we have to go through with it and accept propagating infected plants to preserve this plant heritage.

 

In Bordeaux, tens of thousands of hectares are being uprooted, and everyone remembers the Beaujolais crisis. Does this frighten you?

It's a shockwave. Wine growing is the only agricultural sector in France to be managed unilaterally. The ODG (Organisme de Gestion of each appellation) decides alone, whatever the state of the market. The problem is that there are crises, we produce wines, and then we wonder what to do with them. We say to ourselves: let's create an appellation to sell at a higher price, but no, it's the consumer who creates the appellation; it's the notoriety that makes it possible to sell at a higher price. We're doing everything backwards! Crises always start with a climatic accident. The winemaker produces half a crop and doubles his prices to compensate. In a logic where the appellation is a collective asset, the wine merchant agrees to buy at double the price, and holds his breath for a year by reducing his margins to keep the market alive, using up his stocks and thinking that the following year prices will return to normal. The next vintage arrives, the winegrower fills his tanks, the merchants are looking for wine, he keeps the same prices and the merchant replies: fine, I'll buy, I need wine, but this time, I'll pass the increase on to the final price. My importer, who used to take 100 cases, says to me: at that price, I'll only buy 40. Meanwhile, the harvest has piled up and the consumer, who doesn't care about hail or frost, can only see one thing: rising prices. The result is a crisis of overproduction born of short-term Malthusian greed. When you ignore the market, the backlash is inevitable, not to mention the fact that these artificial increases in the price of wine lead to higher land prices and problems in passing on vines.

 

“My life is an eternal thunderbolt,” you explain on your website…

that's all old news. Who updates the site? (laughs)

 

In short, after establishing operations in Australia, Portugal, Spain, Alsace, and the Beaujolais What are your upcoming projects?

We've learned things elsewhere, such as how to adapt to global warming by going to Australia, but in the end... what if we now focused on replanting, on promoting the vat terroirs that have been forgotten in our region... but without forgetting the economic dimension: how many hours of work per hectare per year, what technical solution should we choose to be profitable? When i was young, we did what we wanted and there was a lot of freedom in terms of pricing, whereas today, competition is everywhere. The world of wine is not the same as it was thirty years ago...

 

Interview by Cécile de Blauwe and Christophe Tupinier

Photographs: Maison Chapoutier