Chasing the World’s Greatest Loires from London to the Sologne
Young winemaker Etienne Courtois is feted around the world but shunned at home
The wine arrived yesterday! It’s sitting in my apartment, I’m very happy. But it wasn’t easy.
The story starts in London, in July. Michelle and I were staying in Covent Garden, and she found a nice-looking bistro nearby where we could have dinner. We chose it partly because it was nearby, and in large part because of the sample menu on the website: simple, hearty, rustic fare like sardines and black pudding and andouillette. London is a fantastic place for French food, these days: while it has had better food than Paris for many years, of late I think it even has better French food than Paris. (Although I’ll admit that I’m in the minority on this one.)
Once we got to the restaurant, however, we quickly discovered where it really shines: It has the most astonishing Loire Valley wine list. I’m a huge fan of Loire wines, and normally they’re something of an afterthought, but here they’re the main event, pretty much the whole thing. A kind of breadth and depth which probably exists nowhere else in the world. (Not even in the Loire Valley itself — I’ll come back to the reason for that later.) What’s more, the list was clearly put together with real love and passion — and humor. This was, clearly, my kind of restaurant, and it didn’t take long before we were ordering a funky wine from an obscure winemaker in the Sologne — and then another, and then, the following night, another, and another.
The winemaker in question is Etienne Courtois, a seventh-generation winemaker and son of Claude Courtois. We pretty much drank our way through all of the Courtois wine that the restaurant offered, and loved all of it. It was honest, and full of character, displaying the skills of a winemaker using a lot of relatively obscure regional grapes (think Gascon, Romorantin, Pinot d’Aunis, that kind of thing) which, grown organically and naturally, come together and really sing. It’s the kind of food-friendly wine which New York sommeliers adore, these days — but for some reason Etienne Courtois seems all but unknown on this side of the Atlantic. (Jenny & Francois do import some Claude Courtois wines, but they’re not easy to find.)
If you look up Etienne Courtois online, you’ll pretty much begin and end with this excellent and very detailed blog post by Bertrand Celce. I highly recommend you read it: It gives a great flavor of both winemaker and wine. Etienne was 23 at the time, and it didn’t take long for Michelle and me to decide that on our Loire Valley vacation, we were going to look this kid up.
Which turns out to be easier said than done. Etienne Courtois is not your typical Millennial: His life is the farm, and while he cares deeply about making excellent wine, he doesn’t seem to care nearly as much about things like picking up the phone, or having an email address.
And so it was that we found ourselves punching an address into our rental car’s GPS and hoping for the best. Pro tip: that doesn’t work. After driving much longer than we ought to have driven, the GPS announced that we had arrived; in fact, we were in the middle of a wheat field. Switching to Google Maps didn’t help, either: that just dropped us off in the middle of a different wheat field.
At this point I was ready to give up, but Michelle is made of sterner stuff than I am, and so we drove into town, to see if there was any help there. The friendly guy in the Tabac pointed vaguely down the road, so we knew what direction the Courtois farm was in — and then, miraculously, I saw a map by the side of the road! It didn’t have the names of any vignerons on it, but it did have the names of a couple of vineyards — including one name I recognized from our dinners in London. I got out my iPhone, worked out which roads were which, put a pin where I thought the vineyard should be, and… well, long story short, we found the place.
Of course, our timing couldn’t have been worse: It was the first day of harvest. (Etienne Courtois, it seems, harvests at least some of his grapes a good couple of weeks before anybody else in the Loire Valley.) But Etienne could not have been kinder, and gave us the full tasting tour: all of his wines, various stuff in barrel, everything. Along with a perfectly French accompaniment of a fresh baguette and gorgeous local goat’s cheese.
The Courtois operation, it turns out, is a fascinating combination: It’s both deeply traditional and fiercely iconoclastic. And it rapidly became clear to us why no one we had talked to in the region had ever heard of him. Etienne Courtois might be a star in far-flung places like Tokyo and Copenhagen (the visitor before us was the sommelier at Noma), but he’s far from celebrated in the Loire Valley, or even, for that matter, in the Sologne.
Indeed, for most of the time that the Courtois family has been making wine in the Loire (they were previously much further south, in Provence), they have been involved in some kind of litigation or other. Etienne Courtois makes wine in much the same way that his father does, but he emphatically does not make wine in much the same way that everybody else does in the region. And that gives him — and his wines — a real outsider status.
Winemaking in the Loire Valley is an honest agricultural trade, as I like to think it should be everywhere. It doesn’t have the pretensions of say Bordeaux, or the Napa Valley: There are precious few grand wine estates here, and prices top out at pretty modest levels. (Look, for instance, at the legendary Clos Rougeard, of which the importer says “Would you like to buy some? It is exceptionally expensive. And it is sold out.” In reality, it’s not that hard to find, and at double-digit prices, to boot. Hell, as recently as last year, you could buy a bottle of the 2004 in a restaurant — Balthazar, no less — for just $100.)
Here’s what you need to get, if you want to understand what makes Etienne Courtois pretty much unique. Wine is made in more or less the same way across most of the Loire. You grow the specific grape which has been grown in your region for centuries; you vinify it; you’re done. It’s an unpretentious way of doing things, but it’s also a way of giving the terroir center stage, and it encourages fine distinctions between different vineyards.
This is one reason why it’s hard to find a great Loire wine list, like the one you can find at the Green Man and French Horn in London, in the Loire. If you go somewhere in Chinon, you’ll be faced with a long list of Chinon wines, and it’s a wonderful experience to be able to go through them. They’ll all be the same grape (Cabernet Franc), they’ll all be vinified in pretty much the same way, and what you’ll be tasting, in large part, will be the subtle differences between various different plots of land.
It’s the same with the wine shops in the Loire: The ones in Chinon will sell Chinon, the ones in Bourgueil will sell Bourgueil. Some wines will be better than others, of course. But this is the essence of old-fashioned French winemaking: What really matters, above everything else, is the terroir, the specific plot of land where your wine was made. A Chinon will taste like a Chinon, and then there are relatively small differences between them.
It’s hard to imagine what California wines would be like if, say, Napa were like that. You’d see the regional appellations coming first (Oakville, Rutherford, St Helena), and everybody growing only Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay (OK, maybe that’s not such a stretch), the differences between the appellations being bigger than the differences within each one. What’s more, when you were in Rutherford, you’d never find an Oakville wine (let alone a Sonoma wine), and vice versa.
So the Loire Valley is the anti-Napa in many ways: While Napa wineries age their wines in pristine cellars full of spotless new oak barrels, for instance, Loire vintners use ancient old things (some of Etienne Courtois’s barrels are 50 years old or more, and were used by his grandfather) which are generally covered in a fuzzy layer of mold. Winemaking in the Loire is more natural than you’ll generally find in California: It’s closer to the land, and less precise. (Courtois, however, is still very much in the minority in being completely organic.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean that anything goes — far from it. In fact, winemaking in the Loire Valley is generally much more rigid than it is in California: winemakers have many fewer degrees of freedom. And that’s exactly why Courtois, for all that he has something of a cult following in foreign capitals, is in large part shunned by the Loire winemaking establishment. They’re constantly suing him, or his father, because he uses lots of different grape varieties (some of which even he doesn’t know what they are), and blends them into dozens of different wines.
There are lots and lots of different Courtois cuvées, all made from just a few hectares of vines; some years they’ll make one, some years they’ll make another, and some years they’ll decide to make something they’ve never made before, and call it something brand new. There’s a feeling of constant innovation and experimentation. Etienne Courtois is a man who’s not afraid to fail, once in a while, and that makes drinking one of his wines a real adventure. We drove away from his farm with a few of those experimental bottles; he thinks they might well be wonderful in five years’ time, but no one knows, really, because they’ve never been made before.
It’s hard to generalize about Courtois wines, but they all have a real personality, along with the natural acidity and minerality that you find in most of the Loire. There’s a surprisingly large number of whites, for this part of the Loire, and even a spectacular off-dry wine, Fleur de Damoiselle, which tastes like nothing I’ve ever drunk before.
Michelle and I finished up our visit maybe a little overenthusiastic: We bought 18 bottles, from various cuvées, without any idea of how on earth we were going to get them back to NYC. Certainly our hotel couldn’t help; neither could the local post office. Eventually we spent an entire afternoon driving to a DHL office and back; they could ship wine to England, but not to the USA. But we were smart: We shipped the wine to a superhero in London, who managed to smuggle it into NYC by highly secret means. Thank you, superhero: You know who you are!
For the time being, then, there’s no easy way to drink the wine of Etienne Courtois. Trying to find him in person is non-trivial, to say the least. Jenny and Francois seem to import four cuvées: If you can find one, buy it. And of course getting a reservation at Noma is crazy hard. But if you find yourself in London, do stop by the Green Man and French Horn. They’ll happily crack open a bottle for you.
