November 2015

The city of Bordeaux stands on the banks of the Gironde, a broad Atlantic estuary that drains and cools what is probably the most celebrated wine growing region in the world. 

Running north from the city, along the left bank of the estuary, there is a road so obscure that I eventually only found it by chance.  It is known simply as ‘the D2’.  This nondescript strip of tarmac, about 30 miles long, crawling across the thin soil of a gravelly plain known as the ‘Medoc’, is actually a highway that links some of the legendary names of France.  The villages connected by this road are called Cantenac, Margaux, St Julien, Pauillac, St-Estephe.  And the signboards pointing towards the vineyards that cluster around these villages bear the great names of the 1855 classification – Latour, Mouton Rothschild, Léoville-Barton, Chateau Talbot and Chateau Palmer.   The fields stretching away towards distant pine forests on one side and the grey waters of the estuary on the other are part of the most valuable agricultural land in Europe. 

Standing just off the D2, between Margaux and St Julien, is the unassuming settlement of Lamarque.  This is not a name that rings round the world but is the home of one of the most influential figures in the region.  From a modest grey stone building on the main street of Lamarque, the late Jacques Boissenot and his son Eric have made their small laboratory into one of the most respected centres of oenology in France and increasingly around the world.  Jacques Boissenot died last year and now Eric owns and leads the laboratory where he employs only 5 people.  

The role of the oenologist has become quite controversial in recent years.  Some of the most widely-publicised names in the profession have led a movement towards a multinational style of wine that devalues the importance of “terroir” (the soil and climate of a particular vineyard) and replaces it with an emphasis on the characteristics of the grape variety (such as chardonnay or zinfandel).  This movement has met with resistance in Bordeaux, where the concept of terroir, developed over centuries has become enshrined in law.  To learn more about the controversy I called on Nathalie Schyler, the chatelaine of Chateau Kirwan, a 3^rd growth Margaux in the original classification of 1855, who is one of Eric Boissenot’s 150 clients.  

“A lot of nonsense is talked nowadays about the oenologist” she told me.  “They have become superstars.  It is not the oenologist who makes the wine.  It is the wine grower and the cellar master.  The cultivation of the vines is the single most important operation in the process of making wine. The role of the oenologist is very important, but he is an adviser.  Thanks to oenologists we can now make a correct wine in a bad year, but there is a movement today to impose an international taste, to create wine from all over the world that tastes the same, that is fruity and oaked.  And this movement is led by certain celebrated oenologists, some of them here in Bordeaux, who claim that the individual ‘terroir’ (the soil and climate of a particular vineyard) is of no importance. This is completely unacceptable.

“Like all the well-run properties we consult an oenologist, and Eric Boissenot is one of the very best.  Following the harvest in September he comes to see us once a week, to note how the wine has changed. I always say that Eric is like the curé, the old fashioned parish priest, hearing everyone’s confession. He goes everywhere; he knows everything, about all of us, all our rivals.  He is wonderfully discreet and he advises us throughout the process.  

“There are many delicate questions, when to start the écoulage, (running the new wine from the fermentation vats to the barrels), how long to leave the grape skins in (to achieve the correct level of tannin) when to add the pressed wine and so on.  Eric is a great artist of the palate.  We work together throughout the season.

The whole process takes several weeks and if we are not satisfied with the result we just start all over again”.

**

When I eventually met Eric I asked him whether the Boisssenots had always lived in Lamarque.  It turned out that they had quite a turbulent family history, marked by the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.  

“My father’s family”, he told me, “were originally woodworkers from the Jura in the east of France.  They emigrated to Algeria, looking for work at the end of the 19^th century. Then in the 1930’s my grandfather, Théodore, trained as a pilot. He knew Sainte-Exupery and flew with him for Aeropostale, crossing the South Atlantic in single-engined aircraft.  After the Fall of France in 1940 my grandfather somehow managed to get to England, we don’t know how he did this.  He joined the RAF and flew Halifax bombers from Elvington in Yorkshire. 

“My grandfather never spoke about the War.  I remember that he had a deep scar from an old propeller wound across his chest. We know that in the RAF he was considered a “lucky” pilot because he had survived so many sorties with Bomber Command.

On my mother’s side the family is Spanish.  My grandmother came to France as a refugee from the Basque country after the bombing of Guernica. She eventually reached the Medoc and took a job in a big house near Lamarque.  My grandfather was called Antonio Miguel.  He was the youngest of 11 children. His family came from Salamanca, but he was born in Mexico in 1912. His father lost all his property in the Mexican revolution.  They returned to Spain and my grandfather became a maths teacher in Barcelona.  Most of his brothers were killed fighting for the Republicans in the Civil War.  My grandfather left Spain as a refugee in 1939 and eventually escaped from a refugee camp in the north of France and made his way to Bordeaux.   He found work on a big property near Pauillac and one day he heard that there was a Spanish girl living nearby. That’s how my grandparents met.  

“My father had intended to become a vet but he was not successful so he switched to oenology and studied at Bordeaux University under Professor Emile Peynaud. He took his degree in 1964 and after a while he took a job at the Agricultural Workers laboratory in Pauillac.  That’s how he met my mother, who was a school teacher. They married in 1966”. 

Eric was born in 1969 and like all the children in the village in due course he entered ‘CP’ the reception class in the primary school, where his mother was the form teacher.  In the French school system ‘CP’ is a challenging experience where the headmaster traditionally puts his best and often his strictest teachers.   This is where the children are drilled in habits of hard work and discipline that are supposed to last them for life. In the 1970’s the methods used included the dunce’s cap, the smack on the hand, and even the smack on the bottom administered by the headmaster.   

Eric smiles at the memory.  “It was normal, nobody died after all. It was part of school life.  

“In those days Lamarque was a community where more than half the population worked in the wine industry, and every family had some vines.  Except for my father.  All the other boys could say that their fathers were ‘proprietaires’.  They used to go and help on their family plots.  The day my father bought a small vineyard in 1983 he gave me the greatest present he could have given me.  Then I too could go to our property with my father and work beside him on our vines. We still have that property and I still work it, when I have time”.   

Eric’s mother – long retired – still lives in the family house beside the laboratory, and the village primary school is still in the same building, near the church.  Lamarque is about 1 km from the Gironde and after showing me round his laboratory Eric drove me to the Gironde and showed me the deep muddy creek where as a small boy he would be allowed to bathe, lowered into the water attached to a rope.  The current looked rather strong but that was not the main problem.  “We had to watch out for the shrimps on the river bed,” he recalled. “If you didn’t keep moving they nipped you pretty hard”.  

**

In 1971 Jacques Boissenot became bored with the Union laboratory in Pauillac which he described as “like working for the civil service” and decided to open his own laboratory.  He started out with about three clients, so he bought a half-share in a bottling lorry; this was a truck that drove around the small vineyards, bottling the farmers’ wine for them.  That kept him going while he built up the business, and it was a good way to meet new clients.

“In the old days”, explained Eric, “if a wine grower wanted his wine analysed he just took it to the local pharmacy.   They knew nothing about the secondary or malolactic fermentation, in the barrels.  Some thought it was a disease, others would say, ‘Ah, the wine has woken up, it’s getting busy’.   Explaining the malolactic fermentation to them was a big advance because between the first alcoholic fermentation and the second, the wine is fragile.  It can degenerate or develop disease. Afterwards it is stable.  The important thing is to reduce the interval between the two processes.  But if my father pointed out an error the old growers always said, “But that’s the way we’ve always done it”.  They distrusted ‘the chemists’ – the men in white coats.  You had to be very diplomatic with them”.

It was at about this time that the big chateaux started to take an interest in oenology. Professor Peynaud had solved a major problem with an analysis at Chateau Latour in 1965 and this launched his reputation.  In the 1960’s and 70’s many of the fine chateaux were falling down.  The Medoc was not booming, wine was sold cheaply and the weather was bad for a number of years.  Faced with this crisis it became general practise, in about 1975, to consult an oenologist, as Eric puts it, “We finally became respectable”.  

Professor Peynaud soon needed assistance, and so he turned to his old pupil, Jacques Boissenot.

“From 1975 to 1990 my father and Peynaud worked in friendly collaboration, Peynaud was a remarkable man.  He was the first person to insist that the vignerons should only use the best grapes.  He encouraged them to clean up their cellars and to throw away old barrels. He effectively established a new science; he was charismatic, a great teacher, a fine researcher and a populariser. He taught my father a lot.  And when he retired he recommended my father to all his clients.  As a result I have some clients today whose records date back to 1964.

“Our own clients greatly increased during the 1980’s and there was a big advance in the quality of the wine.  Before then it was hit and miss, the growers never really knew why things had gone right or wrong and the great vintages were more or less made by chance”.

**

In 1989 Eric left school and went to university.  His primary interest was geology, and then palaeontology, which clearly still fascinates him.  But after some hesitation he put this preference aside and took a degree in oenology under Professor Seguin, Peynaud’s successor.  In 1997 Eric was awarded a doctorate for his thesis on ‘The wine producing soils of the Medoc’, and his fate was sealed.  

**

For three months from early November, Eric Boissenot’s working day consists in visiting six to eight properties testing each vat of fermented wine and analysing it to resolve any problems it may have. Once the fermentation is complete he has to advise on the best time to start the ecoulage. Then he has to advise on the blend, the assemblage, and his day gets even busier.  (When I first asked to meet him there was a long pause before he sent an apology saying that he had been “desperately trying to find the time” to reply to my email). 

The ‘assemblage’ involves tasting every barrel.  At each property he has to work through 3 or 4 different grape varieties, from vines of different ages, growing on different types of soil.  “There is an old saying among vignerons, he says, “‘the earth changes with every step’.  And it is true.  One Margaux is not the same as another.  Newcomers do not always realise how complex the business is”. 

Once the wine is run off into barrels the analysis is complete and it is tasting that decides on the final blend.  When it comes to blending Eric works with pen, pencil and a wine glass.  He uses the eye, the nose and the palate.  The science of analysis gives way to the physical senses.  He compares the work to that of a parfumier, “it is a very special metier”. It becomes even more challenging when he works on the sweet white wines of Sauternes.  “White wine contains no tannin and the little details can be concealed by the varying sugar levels. We really only have the bouquet to help us.  This makes it a very interesting task”.

**

I asked Eric if he wanted his son, now aged 12, to become an oenologist and he said that the boy had recently asked him the same question.  Eric said that he wouldn’t influence his son either way.  His own father had left the choice up to him.  

“It’s not easy to work with your father, and it’s not an easy profession anyway.  My father never retired.  He died working.  You can’t make mistakes – if you do the clients notice at once.  And they only want the best advice.  There’s not much sentiment in the business.  You have to possess complete confidence in your own judgements.  Until my father died last year I had spent my entire working life with him. We did 30 vintages together, so I am determined to carry on”.  

Above all he is determined to retain the humility that he learnt from his father and from Professor Peynaud.  He leaves the posing to others and he will never follow the latest fashion.  

After showing me round the impeccable laboratory, with its rows of sample bottles filled with the purple red juice of cabernet and merlot, Eric invited me to join him for lunch at a local restaurant, “the Lion d’Or”.

Thinking of the frequent changes in fashion he said, “First we had fruitier wine.  Then it had to be smoother, then less acidic.  For ten years there was a passion for oak, and then it had to be oaked and sweetened”.  None of this interested the Boissenots.  And today Eric is still guided by the conviction of Professor Peynaud.  “He taught my father the culture of wine, to make use of ‘the genius of the terroir’, to practise humility, not to push oneself forward, not to be influenced by fashion or hierarchy, above all to remain true to the wine”.

He sipped a Chateau St Pierre 2005 -a St. Julien from the Domaine St Martin – which he had kindly selected from his personal cellar and added, “After all, I am working with the best wine in the world”.

endit