Organic before it was a thing

Last week I attended a seminar hosted by Vinous in NYC, where they invited Cyril Chirouze, the estate manager of Clos Rougeard.

Over the course of the seminar, we tasted four wines produced by the winery across the 2015, 2016, and 2017 vintages. I’ll admit something upfront: before this, I had never heard of Clos Rougeard.

But what struck me most during the tasting was how deeply the estate was anchored in its traditions. In a world where trends often come and go, there is something compelling about remaining connected to your history, your land, and tradition.

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In the 1960s, everyone got the memo. Spray your vines, use the new fertilizers. Yields go up, effort goes down. Nearly every winemaker in the Loire Valley signed on.

Charly and Nady Foucault looked at the memo and “no thanks”.

Not because they were contrarians. Not because they’d read about natural farming or had some big vision for where wine was headed. They just kept doing what their father had done. And what his father had done. The same way it had been done on their land in Chace since 1664.

No synthetic chemicals, no shortcuts, plow the earth, leave the vine to do its thing.

Their neighbors called them utopians.

The thing about never changing: you end up with something the rest of the world spends decades trying to get back.

The Foucault’s vines had never been treated with synthetic inputs. Some of them are now over a hundred years old and have never seen a pesticide. The soil underneath is full of microorganisms and mineral complexity that makes wine taste like its actually from somewhere.

When Charly and Nady took over in 1969, they didn’t inherit a winery. They inherited an unbroken thread.

Their famous quote: “The only thing that’s revolutionary about us is that we’ve never changed"

For years they made the wine in the cellars directly beneath their family home in Chace. No grand winery, no visitor centre, no tasting room with a gift shop. If you wanted to visit, you sent a fax and heard nothing, until one day Nady called back, laughing so hard: “So you want to visit us….”

You showed up to a closed house. A neighbor throws shade at you from across the street like neighborhood watch.

That was Clos Rougeard.

Eventually, the natural wine movement arrived. Low intervention, native yeasts, hands off. Suddenly everyone was talking about farming the way the Foucaults had always farmed.

Saumur-Champigny use to be known for cheap bistro reds, now is one of the most exciting appellations in the world.

The Foucaults didn’t change a thing. And Cyril Chirouze, the current estate manager, said the same thing: “We are sticking to our tradition”

Clos Rougeard makes fewer than 60k bottles a year. Most of it never leaves France.

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How many of these can you taste?