Pollux Membership July 2022: Burgundy Ex Nihilo and “I’m Walking on Fog Line”
Jean-Michel Guillon and I, January 2020.
“Burgundy Ex Nihilo”
Domaine Jean-Michel Guillon Santenay “Les Bras” 2014
Something from Nothing. It seems that there are those among us, regardless of discipline or walk of life, that just have a vision for their future and are able to will it into a tangible reality. Well, if any mortal winemaker can make it happen, it’s Jean-Michel Guillon. Arriving to his winery’s staff room before daylight, having done his requisite regimen of pushups upon rising from bed, Jean-Michel and his son Alexis make a pot of coffee that could have powered lunar excursion vehicles and proceed to pour shots of it to us and the vineyard workers, a ritualistic transfer of power that is repeated each day (“you work for us, but right now we work for you, and soon we’ll all work for the real boss-the terroir”). It’s easy to like and respect Jean-Michel Guillon, and not because his wines are some of my all-time favorites through a two-decade career; he seems like a walking contradiction with his impossibly high standards and expectations poured through an exceedingly soft and gentle voice, and his laugh at 65 is still that of a boy’s, infectious and good-natured. I could (and probably will in months to come) write volumes about my experiences with this man, but in this moment, I would like to bring you a short look at the inception of his Domaine.
Tasting in the cellar with Jean-Michel Guillon, surrounded by his annual stock of brand new barrels, 2011.
The year is 1980, and a young man of 25 steps off the train in Burgundy-a former air force pilot with an ambition to make wine. Jean-Michel Guillon has no vineyards of his own, no family land, no space to vinify and age wine should he even gets his hands on some juice…truly trying to create something from nothing. Now to be fair, Jean-Michel is a man, not a deity, so his story does depend on a little bit of assistance, and he finds it, fittingly, from a man of the cloth. Father Rene Galland was a monk in the Burgundy village of Gevrey-Chambertin in the Cote de Nuits; encountering Jean-Michel, Pere Galland offered the young Guillon a place to vinify and age his wines, and leased him his first vineyards. Galland also taught him many time-honored monastic “recipes”; techniques for making wine that Jean-Michel still employs to this day, and which in a laughingly ironic twist of fate resulted in BurgHound critic Allan Meadows calling Guillon “one of the very best of the modern style of Burgundy vintners”, to which Jean-Michel now smiles and says, “Yes, my 800 year old modern winemaking”. With a tireless work ethic and unconditional love of the vineyards and farming (he’s since been known to skip out on vacations if he sees a bad weather pattern on his iPhone), mentored by his idol and Burgundy legend Henri Jayer, over the course of two decades Jean-Michel slowly builds up both his winemaking skills and his vineyard holdings. Working methodically to increase the size of his estate, the late 1990s and 2000s see a period of growth…Gevrey-Chambertin. Marsannay. Nuits-St.-Georges. Morey-St.-Denis. Parcels in the Grand Cru vineyards of Mazis-Chambertin and Clos de Vougeot. Jean-Michel Guillon acquires them all and works to understand each site down to the blade of grass under the vines. He builds a new winery, and a new cellar to connect the additional caves to his original one. The tunneling work? Jean-Michel handles it, of course (his son Theo, having inherited this skill and more, is now a stone mason).
My “Religious Pamphlet” cloud shot outside of the Domaine post-tasting.
Fast-forward into the 2010s and Jean-Michel is a scion of the village of Gevrey-Chambertin; he is elected president of the appellation (a post he holds until 2019) and his eldest son, Alexis, has joined him in the vineyards and the cellar. His unwavering obsession with the totality of the winemaking process leads him to push the envelope in every aspect of his eponymous Domaine: believing wholly in the concept of aging his wines in new barrels, Jean-Michel takes on the staggering financial burden of purchasing an entire cellar’s worth of new barrels each year, selling off the 1-year old barriques he just purchased the previous vintage. Every one of his now 24-strong cuvees receives this 5-star treatment, from Bourgogne to Grand Cru. He even goes so far as to travel to the forests with his cooperage to hand-select the trees his oak will come from. Needing amazingly ripe, dense, complex fruit to stand up to the new oak, Guillon pushes the concentration of his wines to amazing new levels, invests in technology to improve his ability to sort only the finest, weightiest berries, and later computerizes the entire cellar to be able to individually control the fermentation temperature of each tank remotely. Dissatisfied with having his team’s hard work result in a flawed bottle due to corkage, he pays extra to purchase organic corks made of sugar cane for his Bourgogne level wines and has his other corks triple lab-tested. Ultra-violet lot numbers and codes not visible to the naked eye mark his shipments and allow him to avoid his wines appearing on the grey market. In short, nothing goes unnoticed because Jean-Michel Guillon, now 67 years old, doesn’t deal in nothings. He deals in somethings-D.
Domaine Jean-Michel Guillon Santenay “Les Bras”, Burgundy 2014
Country of Origin: France
Places and People: Jean-Michel Guillon was a former air force pilot who created his eponymous winery in 1980 with nothing-no vineyards of his own, no space to vinify or age. In fact, it was a monk in Gevrey-Chambertin, Pere Galland, that first leased him vineyards and a space to make the wine, and taught him many time-honored monastic techniques that are still in use at the winery to this day. Fast-forward 42 years and Jean-Michel now is a scion of his home village of Gevrey-Chambertin (and former long-time president of the appellation), with holdings spread across several villages, including Grand Cru parcels in Mazis-Chambertin and Clos de Vougeot. Santenay is at the south of the Cote de Beaune near the village of Maranges-the village of Santenay lies due south of Chassagne-Montrachet. The Les Bras vineyard is located in the far western corner of the village, with some of the highest elevation (close to 500 meters).
Soil: Calcareous clay and chalk-the minerality of the soil is visually evident-Les Bras always looks like it’s snowing regardless of the time of year because the soil is so white.
Grape Varieties: 100% Chardonnay.
Winemaking: Hand-harvested and rigorously assorted. 2014 was the first vintage for the Domaine to carry their prestigious “Haute Valeur Environmentale” certification, an achievement that few in all of Burgundy can claim. The extended fermentation length and employment of ancient monastic warming techniques contributes to a richness and concentration of fruit not usually evident in Santenay. Batonnage (stirring of the lees in barrel) has been avoided since the 2012 vintage in Jean-Michel’s white wines as a way of balancing the techniques described above.
Aging: The 2014 Santenay “Les Bras” is nurtured for one year in 100% new French oak barrels that were specially made for Jean-Michel.
Flavors and Foods: Jean-Michel’s Santenay Les Bras is truly a bold white Burgundy, with a structure and complexity that belies its southerly location. The initial fruit profile of the 2014 is baked pineapple, yellow apple, and ripe melon, with a full structure and round, rich mouthfeel. Earthy notes are well-evident due to the higher location of the vineyard, with elements of chalk on nose and palate and non-fruit secondary notes of honeyed wheat. The oak aging is definitely evident on the palate, but only in terms of structure; the investment in new barrels provides a soft bed for the tropical fruit notes and heightened acidity of the 2014 to rest upon; oak flavors are well-integrated at this point with no overt baking spices or butter. An excellent and powerful Chardonnay that evokes comparison with its more famous neighbors to the north (Chassagne-Montrachet for certain, and for the 2014 vintage, even its neighbor Pugliny, because of the crackling acidity).
Service and Cellar: The fun thing about the 2014 is how open and bright it is, so I actually like to accentuate that by serving this wine in the low 50s (no more than 52)F, rather than chilling it and closing down the grilled pineapple and melon. This vintage, by no means stalwart, is in capable shape in Jean-Michel and Alexis’s hands, and I feel as though the lack of lees stirring leaves a more acid-driven, fresh palate that should continue to do well for another 2 years. The Santenay 2014 is really a “drink now” wine, though-an excellent opportunity to catch a wine in the window it is meant to be enjoyed in.
High-elevation vineyards in the Douro Valley, summer 2014.
“I’m Walking on Fog Line”
Douro Tinto Riserva, Conceito 2010
I first met Rita Ferreira Marques when she came to dinner at my restaurant in Washington, DC in 2011; her Mid-Atlantic importer and my future boss, Jonas Gustafsson, and she had come seeking refuge from a workday that had included myriad appointments with buyers all over DC and Northern Virginia, plus a happy hour tasting/pouring session at a wine bar. I had been working with Rita’s wines for several years already at that point, so I was naturally excited to meet the young winemaking talent that had in just a few short vintages become a critical darling, called “a rising young star of the Douro Valley” in umpteen publications falling over themselves trying to be the first to write about her. The young woman I met that night (“young” being relative-heck, I was a young man too at that point) was a bit shy and reserved, but also firmly entrenched in the idea of what she had done-taking her family for a rollercoaster of a ride from backwater Port wine grapegrowers into being front and center in the Douro Valley’s still wine revolution. It hadn’t always been an easy road, but her resolve showed in her face, and her quick smile and good humor shone through the humility and broken English. All of her personal charm, however, was just backdrop to the issue of meritocracy: taste one glass of her wines, from fresh vibrant Vinho Verde to reserve level, age-worthy reds, and Rita could have convinced me on any wine project she wanted, provided she was the winemaker.
The town of Vila Nova de Foz Coa, the administrative center of the Douro Superior and where Conceito has their cellar and offices.
Rita Marques’ maiden name is Ferreira-right, those Ferreiras. If you drink port at all, no doubt you’ve seen their name on a bottle. Rita’s grandfather and great-uncle were related to the main bloodline of Port’s only house to have spent its entire history in Portuguese-owned hands. Jose Costa Ferreira and Luis Costa Ferreira didn’t live in the heart of the Douro, however; they farmed vineyards starting in the 1940s in the eastern part of the Valley known as the Douro Superior. A 50 mile drive from the actual Ferreira winery that takes over 90 minutes to complete given the cracked country roads and hair-raising slopes, the Douro Superior is wild country, still relatively undeveloped and underserved as far as infrastructure. Here, the elevations are almost double that of the heart of the Douro Valley to the west, as the Douro River meanders unevenly before making a series of sharp turns and heading towards Spain, where it is known as the Duero (and home to another famous wine region, Ribera del Duero). The main town and administrative center of the wineries of Douro Superior is Vila Nova de Foz Coa, a towering metropolis of 7,300 people living in whitewashed houses bedecked with orange terra cotta roofs. Rita’s uncle Jose was mayor of this town during his time in charge of their family’s firm, and in the six decades between their start and Jose’s passing in 2000, this outpost of the Ferreira family never bottled their own wines, always selling instead to the famed port houses or on behalf of a cooperative they created for growers in the Teja Valley. When Rita came back from enology school in Bordeaux and a three-year tour of work in some of the world’s most dynamic wine regions (New Zealand, South Africa among them), she saw a different potential in these vineyards that stretched up to 600 meters in the air, meaning that the continental climate and corresponding warmer temperatures didn’t affect the vines as precipitously. Rita’s family had property mainly in 4 quintas (estates) southwest of Vila Nova de Foz Coa, in the Teja valley, which enjoyed slightly cooler temperatures and an increase in the well-drained, mineral-rich schist soil. In the highest of her vineyards, in what was supposed to be exclusively port wine country, Rita saw a chance to craft powerful whites and reds that would still retain their acid due to climactic and soil factors that made her family’s situation unique; as she told me that night many years ago, “I go to vineyards in the morning and I’m walking on Fog Line” (meaning that her grapes weren’t hindered in ripeness by moisture settling in lower-lying pockets, but the way that she said it had me singing “I’m walking on Fog Line” to “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves for weeks after our dinner together). Rita only had one job to do: convince her mother and grandfather to reconstruct their entire business around her and her winemaking.
Quinta da Veiga, perched on an impossible slope just outside the village of Cedovim, is one of the properties the Ferreira family owns in the Teja Valley (a tributary of the Douro).
Rita told me about a morning she had with her mother, Carla Costa Ferreira, on the steep slopes of one of their family’s holdings. She said, “Mom, I’m thinking of making a wine here,” to which Carla replied, “Fine, but these vineyards here are going to be difficult to make port.” Rita swallowed nervously and said, “Mom, I’m not going to make port-I’m going to make still wines, and we are going to bottle them ourselves for the first time.” Despite her initial hesitancy, Rita’s mother signed onto the plan and became CEO of a new, restructured version of the family agriculture company-a winery, called Conceito (“Concept” in Portuguese). Rita’s grandfather Luis was less accepting, but now observes the harvest each year from their property in Cedovim with what the family terms “a well-disguised shred of pride”, and spending much of the rest of the year in the university town of Coimbra. Rita’s tenacity and vision paid off almost from the start: the reviews were enthusiastic for the initial 2005 vintage and only grew as Rita and her small team refined their work and became more familiar with their vineyard holdings (83 ha in total for an overall production of less than 10,000 cases). Working with the traditional Douro Valley field blends of native Portuguese varietals (Rita would often say that she’d look down a row of vines and even she couldn’t tell which grapes were present after decades of cross-pollination), Conceito made pure, powerful white wines aged in oak barrels and red wines drenched in dried dark fruits and the minerally earth of the schist. The press was not (and never really is) the most important part of the Conceito story; in all of my career I don’t know that I’ve ever seen wines be more universally appreciated by sommeliers and wine buyers-when I worked to represent Conceito in DC and VA, I sold the wines to French bistros, Italian restaurants who wanted an international section on their lists, hip and trendy wine bars, you name it-the professionals just wanted to serve Rita’s amazing wines and tell her story. Tasting the 2010 Tinto for this feature, a wine that is perfectly in the pocket at 12 years of age, crafted from a single vineyard of 60-year-old vines, it is easy to understand what all of the fuss was about. Rita Ferreira Marques was right to celebrate her wine independence, and her Tinto still has me “Walking on Fog Line”.-D.
Conceito Douro Tinto Riserva 2010
Country of Origin: Portugal
Places and People: Rita Ferreira Marques makes the Conceito Tinto Reserve from a single vineyard of 60-year-old vines at her family’s Quinta do Cabido property adjacent to the Teja river, a hook in the river forms a perfect natural amphitheatre for the rows of vines. The elevation of the vineyard rises to some 500 meters, and the schist soil is so thick here it actually diverts the river’s path. The total production of the 2010 Tinto is small (833 cases).
Soil: Schist.
Grape Varieties: A traditional Douro Valley “field blend” of native Portuguese varieties, the percentages in the Conceito Tinto are always difficult to ascertain, but some of the varieties that feature prominently are Tinta Roriz (synonym for Tempranillo), Touriga Nacional, Tourica Franca, Tinta Cao, and everyone’s favorite, Bastardo.
Winemaking: Hand-harvested (because it has to be; the vineyards here are too steep for machines or even animals; some of the most difficult land to work in the entire world of wine). Gentle press of the juice and fermentation in stainless steel vats at temperature control.
Aging: The Conceito Tinto 2010 was nurtured for 12 months in French oak barrels, 50% of which were new.
Flavors and Foods: What a time to drink this wine! The bottle age has both mellowed certain aspects of the Tinto 2010 and enhanced others; a bouquet of red and black currants and brambly black fruit is still the focus of the nose even a decade in. The oak barrel aging is a non-factor on the nose (and the palate really, except as a textural advantage). The fruit on the palate mirrors the nose and adds an element of black cherry compote as well. The fruit is now equalled by the minerally, earthy notes from the schist soil, and I believe it’s the schist’s presence that has the wine “sit down” on the palate (by that I mean this wine really concentrates itself on your tongue and lower part of the mouth)-marvelously and seamlessly featured as an equal partner to the fruit. Dried sage and thyme, black Mediterranean olives, a slight licorice character (like savory-minded European candies), and a cigar box spice are also prevalent-in short, the 2010 Tinto is complex and stellar right now. Grilled, smoked meat on the more rustic side would be my optimal food pairing choice; think grilled boneless lamb leg or dry-aged, grassfed steaks with some gamey flavor notes. The Conceito would also do well with a Mediterranean-inspired marinade with black olive at the core, and if you were so inclined you could do worse than to keep some Tinto on hand for after dinner, served with a delicious blue cheese.
Service and Cellar: 58-62 degrees F (red wine cellar temp) is outstanding for the Conceito, as it is a powerful wine and will be enjoyed without accentuating the alcohol. The 2010 was a challenging vintage made wonderfully by Rita, and although I don’t think this will be a 20+ year wine like other vintages of her Tinto Riserva, the 2010 is perfectly cellared for you right now and will be content in your collection for another 3-4 years.