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ST.-CIBARD,
France — The French have a notion that has no real counterpart in
English for discussing a delicious wine. It is digestibilité,
digestibility in English, a single word that, like terroir, connotes
something far more complex.
Digestibilité
begins with deliciousness, but it also indicates wines that are easy to
drink without weighing heavily in the gut. It’s an immediate,
unmediated pleasure that nonetheless may be complex and contemplative.
The term is often used for natural wines,
those produced with only minimal intervention. That is one reason you
rarely see the term applied in Bordeaux, a wine region where the best
wines, regardless of price, ought to be among the most digestible wines
in the world yet are too often weighed down by excesses in viticulture,
winemaking and reverence.
But here on a rocky plateau near this small town, just east of Pomerol and St.-Émilion, sits Château le Puy,
where the Amoreau family has grown grapes for more than 400 years. The
winery produces superb Bordeaux that epitomizes the notion of
digestibilité.
Indeed,
digestibility is in a way part of Le Puy’s charter. Jean Pierre
Amoreau, the current custodian of the property — along with his wife,
Françoise; son, Pascal; and daughter, Valérie — told me on a visit to Le
Puy this spring that he has three requirements for a good wine.
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First, wine must refresh. Second, the first sip must make a good impression. And third, it must be digestible.
As
with the best Bordeaux wines, those of Le Puy are marked by purity,
precision, lightness and drinkability that encourages taking another
sip. They also have an intensity of flavor despite their grace, a
combination more often associated with that other great region in the
east of France.
“It’s the best Burgundy wine from Bordeaux,” said Steven Hewison, Mr. Amoreau’s son-in-law, who is in charge of production.
Le
Puy’s approximately 125 acres of vines, 50 years old on average, are
planted on a mixture of limestone, clay and flint soils that are
certified biodynamic. Le Puy is no recent convert to this now fashionable form of organic viticulture.
Almost
all agriculture was organic until after World War II, when chemical
agriculture became the norm. But not at Le Puy, where the soil has never
felt the sting of fertilizers and herbicides.
“My
grandfather was too stingy to buy chemicals,” Mr. Amoreau said. His
grandfather, he said, was influenced by André Birre, a mid-20th-century
agronomist, who urged farmers to look after the health of their soils
and recommended methods not unlike biodynamics.
“Nobody in wine really talked about biodynamics until the 1990s,” Mr. Amoreau said.
Now,
Mr. Amoreau is among the most passionate advocates for biodynamics in
the true sense of the theory, which calls for farms to be independent,
diverse estates in which everything that is required for a healthy
growing environment is one ecosystem. This is not the compromised
version that many grape growers are compelled to practice.
In
most wine regions, especially prosperous areas like Burgundy where
biodynamic viticulture is revered by many top producers, you see almost
nothing but a monotonous tableau of vineyards end to end.
A
true biodynamic farm must be a polyculture, made up of not only diverse
crops but also untended wild areas, where beneficial birds, insects and
mammals live. This biological diversity theoretically creates symbiotic
relationships on the farm in which pests and diseases are kept in check
naturally rather than through artificial means.
Along
with the vines, Le Puy has another 150 acres devoted to forests and,
among other things, fig trees, hazelnut trees and beehives. About 100
pounds of oak-blossom honey were harvested last year.
“The
ecosystem is even more important than biodynamics,” Mr. Amoreau said.
“When you work in a monoculture, it changes the fauna. You end up with
more parasites than predators. The wild areas have more predators. You
have to have wild areas around the vines to maintain a balance.”
Bordeaux has been slow to adopt organic and biodynamic viticulture. Slowly, though, several top chateaus like Pontet-Canet in Pauillac and Palmer in Margaux have begun to adopt the philosophy. Le Puy has been there all along.
Mr.
Amoreau believes it is crucial to maintain the soft airiness of the
soil, which he says directly affects its microbial life and, eventually,
the quality of the wine. Worms, microbes and bacteria weave passages in
the dirt permitting the roots to plunge deep into the limestone
bedrock, which he said contributed elegance and finesse to the wines. To
that end, Le Puy was worked closely with Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, who are among the world’s leading experts on soil and its relationship to wine.
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In
an effort to maintain the soil’s lightness, Château le Puy now uses
four horses for plowing about a third of its vines instead of heavy
tractors, which can compress and harden the earth. In those plots, every
third row is left unplowed so that tractors have a path for spraying
biodynamic preparations made of ingredients like ground quartz and
stinging nettles. The unplowed row is changed each year to minimize soil
compaction. Eventually, the chateau hopes to use the horses over its
entire property.
“You
need life in the ground and life in the environment to get life in the
vines,” said Harold Langlais, an associate winemaker who is also a
partner in Le Puy.
Asked
to describe his overall philosophy, Mr. Amoreau replied, “We have one
guy in the cellar, 20 people in the vineyard.” Nonetheless, the
winemaking process is important as well.
Le
Puy relies on indigenous yeast and easy fermentations, avoiding
extracting too much in the way of tannins and color from the grape skins
and seeds, which can make powerful but tough wines, in a phrase, less
digestible.
“We prefer infusion to extraction,” Mr. Langlais said.
Emilien, the estate’s workhorse cuvée, is aged in foudres
— big, old oak barrels that impart little flavor. The wine receives a
small dose of sulfur dioxide, the wine stabilizer used almost
universally except in the most natural wines.
The
limited production Barthélemy, from a single parcel, is aged in small
old barrels and receives no added sulfur dioxide, yet in each of my
experiences with the wines, it has seemed completely stable.
Le
Puy also makes small amounts of a sweet white wine, Marie-Elisa,
entirely of sémillon. Remarkably, it, too, is made without sulfur,
particularly difficult for a sweet wine as the residual sugar beckons
seductively to the sort of microbes that can ruin a wine.
The
entire production from 2011, one barrel, is still resting in the
cellar, having been nursed along by Mr. Hewison until he thinks it can
withstand the rigors of shipping and storage.
Tasted from the barrel, it was luscious with sweet flavors of flowers, honey and lanolin.
“I think it’s finally stable,” said Mr. Hewison, who is planning to bottle it in September.
At
dinner in the town of St.-Émilion, we drank the 2011 Barthélemy, deep,
pure and energetic and still light and graceful; and the 2010, vibrant
and richer than the 2011, with an added element of mineral complexity.
Best of all was the 2001, with an aroma of violets, silky and complex,
fine and intense.
The
Emilien is a little less dense than the Barthélemy and no less
pleasing. The 2011 was fresh, direct, pure and precise with flavors of
red fruits and minerals. It ages well: A 1982 Emilien that I drank in
2016 was lovely, complex and bright, while a 1970 displayed complex
secondary flavors of tobacco and bramble.
As
with almost all of the properties in the Right Bank regions of
Bordeaux, Le Puy’s reds are dominated by merlot, with lesser proportions
of cabernet sauvignon and other grapes. As Le Puy is not within the
borders of the most prestigious appellations, Pomerol and St.-Émilion,
it is less expensive than equivalent examples of those wines, around $40
a bottle for the Emilien. The rarer Barthélemy is expensive, costing
about $150, which, in the rarefied world of fine Bordeaux, is about the
price of a good St.-Émilion from the same vintage.
Currently,
the Le Puy estate falls within the Côtes de Bordeaux appellation, but
the name of this particular region has been shuffled frequently over the
years. Previously, it has fallen under Bordeaux, Bordeaux Supérieur,
Côtes de Francs and Francs-Côtes-de-Bordeaux.
Mr. Amoreau shrugged. “We’re just Château le Puy,” he said.
Correction: June 16, 2017
An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly the given name of the current custodian of Château le Puy. He is Jean Pierre Amoreau, not Jean-Pierre. The error was repeated in a picture caption.
An earlier version of this article rendered incorrectly the given name of the current custodian of Château le Puy. He is Jean Pierre Amoreau, not Jean-Pierre. The error was repeated in a picture caption.
