Is it allowed to change jobs? Many embrace the beautiful profession of winegrower armed with a conviction that seems unshakeable, although it is divided between sweet hopes, small pleasures, but also… great stress. If these hopes and these joys are more than enough to satisfy the immediate aspirations of the amateur as well as the consumer, the fact remains that stress (economic, technical, climatic or other) will always require increased vigilance for the wine man in the field.
A shortage of glass for bottles, hail, frost or drought that are as frequent as they are unpredictable in the vineyard or the starving markup on prices granted to large-scale retailers such as the SAQ are all deterrents to playing gentleman-farmers. And yet. Anatole de La Brosse, born in Champagne and trained as a telecommunications engineer, is one of those who took up the challenge, with a first vintage in 2019 from Saumur-Champigny. The duty met him at his home, in Parnay, last June, when two of his wines were recently showing their necks for the first time on the shelves of the monopoly. Welcome to Domaine des Closiers.
The birth of a vintage always has a little something moving about it. After all, what is a wine if not the passion of a man to marry beautiful plots of vines to capture their fermented essence and share it with a brother, a friend or a stranger who will be at their tower affected? Let us already suspect the Sieur de La Brosse of being, at the end of this fourth harvest, just as feverish in the delivery as extremely punctilious in the infinite sum of small details which bring everything to a successful conclusion, that is to say say bottled. This is because the man, as athletic as he is ambitious, has a spring in his ideas. An entrepreneur who already loves fine wine and knows how to surround himself with his manager, Pierre Derouin, but also through the advice of a certain Bernard “Nady” Foucault, formerly of Clos Rougeard in Chacé.
In organic conversion since 2020 – it joins the 25% of estates already part of an organic farming approach on the 1400 hectares covering the appellation – its 15 hectares obviously give pride of place to Cabernet Franc (for 95%) , but also Chardonnay (Cuvée Libere on 30 ares) and Chenin Blanc planted on “clay-tuffeau” on a superb plateau in the very south of the Loire. Two white cuvées which also demonstrated, during our visit, excellent dispositions to tattoo happiness on your heart because of the finesse and precision of the style, but also by an assumed mastery of the breedings that the house seems here particularly sensitive to refine further.
Fans know this very well. There is no real Cabernet Franc vinified as a single varietal except in Chinon, Bourgueil, Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil and, as far as we are concerned, only in Saumur-Champigny, where it reaches a state of grace, vigor controlled, but also a delicacy of the most bewitching texture. This, admittedly, without a milliliter of chauvinism. A fact confirmed by the cuvées tasted at the estate, although still under the yoke of a somewhat reckless adolescence, but all the same very revealing of the immense potential of the many plots, including this “Trezellières” which already seems to stand out from the pack. It’s a safe bet that the future will tend towards wooded areas which, under the expertise of Bernard Foucault, will take on the voluptuous patina of grain that had made the reputation of Clos Rougeard while at the same time grafting on it the strong personality of the terroirs and that of Anatole de La Brosse, who has certainly not said his last word here.