Jacques Boissenot
You might not have heard of Jacques Boissenot, or his son Eric, but you will most definitely have heard of the wines that they help to create.
Boissenot just happens to be consultant winemaker on four out of the five First Growths of Bordeaux – first Lafite, who began working with him back in 1976, then Margaux from 1987, followed by Latour in 2000, and finally Mouton, who asked him to join them five years ago. The only one keeping him from a full house is Haut Brion.
But he’s a world away from the higher profile Right Bank consultants – living in a small house in the tiny Medoc village of Lamarque, known only for its ruins of a 15th century fort, and for the ferry that crosses at this point from the Medoc to Blaye. So how does he manage to stay so under the radar? Boissenot trained and then worked alongside the great Emile Peynaud, known as the godfather of oenology, and just like Peynaud, believes strongly that it is the wine’s identity – and that of its owners – that he is serving, not his own.
‘For many wines, there is the terroir, but there is also the philosophy behind it. You need to understand that, to be good at psychology. With the best wines, you don’t have enormous freedom, as you only want to improve them along their own specific lines, to respect what they are.’ A good example of this for him would be the two Pichons. He consults at both Comtesse and Baron, and sees ‘Baron is all about Cabernet Sauvignon; powerful and long-living. Comtesse has that also of course, but there elegance comes to the fore.’
Boissenot wasn’t a born oenologist. He’s not from the Medoc, even though it is clearly his spiritual home, and 190 of his 200 clients are based there. He was born in Beirut when his father was serving there in the military and came back to France when he was seven. The idea of wine was far away – his parents drank jug wine, at best, and he’d never tried wine out of a bottle with a cork until his late teens. He tried to become a vet, but didn’t make the grade, and changed to oenology because he was broke, and a friend suggested that there were easy jobs in it.
Once he made the switch, however, things came naturally pretty quickly. After the faculty of oenology, he helped to create one of five new oenology departments around the Gironde – the first of their kind. Before this, local pharmacists would do testing on wine, until the wine institute created specific wine labs in Entre deux Mers, Graves, the Right Bank and two in the Medoc. Boissenot headed up the one in Pauillac.
‘The job is fascinating, the creation of something, the magic that blending can bring to a wine. And there are always new problems to deal with. Ten years ago, much of oenology was fire fighting, correcting faults from the vineyard or cellar. But today, we have the opposite problem; it’s preventative, all about avoiding problems, because we know so much more about how to harvest healthy grapes.’
‘But healthy grapes bring their own problems – the temptation to push them too hard is sometimes too great to resist. It’s human to exaggerate, and many people want to exaggerate ripeness, extraction, tannins...’.
From this, it figures that he doesn’t believe in certain new technologies (‘Increasingly people macerate the skin for so long that the wine is full of tannins. They then micro-oxygenate to smooth out the tannins out. The obvious question for me is why extract them so strongly in the first place?’) or in new techniques; ‘gravity-led winemaking has some advantages, but don’t believe it has huge advantages, and grapes are only moved through pumps once or twice in a normal process. And I don’t believe in putting grapes whole into tanks – they need a gentle crush to get the winemaking process going. And over-maturity is also not good – we are making wine, not grape juice, and what you leave out is as important as what you put in.’
There is however, one new technique that he is firmly behind, and is increasingly recommending it to all his clients. This is co-innoculation, where the malolactic fermentation takes place at the same time as the alcoholic. It’s a technique practised widely in Australia, but very rare in Bordeaux. For this, you need selected yeasts and selected bacteria, something that is controversial for winemakers wanting everything to be from naturally-occuring yeasts on the vineyard’s grapes.
‘I started out with some trials of this around five years ago. At first I didn’t like the idea, but the yeasts today are so well selected that they really do only degrade the malic acid, leaving everything else in tact. Remember that these selected yeasts are still selected from nature, and you are gaining over a month. This saves in energy costs, and allows you to get the wines into barrel more quickly, without the risks of malo in barrel.’
Boissenot believes in beginning the blending at the start of the ageing process (everyone has a different opinion on this), and co-innoculation allows that process to begin as early as possible. ‘I find it leaves a more clean wine – even if you just use it on the first vat, and the rest begin naturally. It’s always the first one that is difficult to get going.’
As with everyone else, the 2009 vintage is causing excitement. ‘I do feel that 2009 might be better than 2005, but it has barely been born. The merlots in the Medoc, particularly, have done better than in 2005, which will mean a real elegance mixed with the power of the Cabernets. But watch out for the prices, which will shoot right back up...’
‘There is an immoral side to the pricing today. When I arrived in the Medoc, the gap between second and first growths was around 20%. Today it is more like 100%. But perhaps the only ones who complain about this are the ones who can no longer afford them – there seem to be plenty who still can.’
Boissenot is approaching retirement now, as he is well into his 70s, and his son Eric increasingly does the travelling (although they don’t really believe in having overseas clients. Even the Right Bank is seen as being a long way away, and poses a problem as they believe in regular, detailed visits). But his influence is as strong as ever – to the selected few who have heard of him. Christian Seely of Pichon-Logueville described him to Decanter as 'a brilliant man, enormously respected by the people who work with him, discreetly guiding many of the Médoc's greatest properties in the direction of finesse and elegance'
He himself would never say anything so direct: ‘I am not media-friendly, I don’t feel comfortable with it, and I don’t know how to do it. I am just here to let the wine speak for itself.’