The “table of stone” has stood guard for seven millennia already. This is also why it is not yet sold dolmens at IKEA. It takes more than that to break his morale or make him loyal to the vicissitudes of planned obsolescence. Ephemeral fashions like perpetual eternities do not frighten him. It’s because this enlightened guardian, coming from the dawn of time, has worked for ages to bridge, without fail, between past and future, between cosmic and telluric, between light and darkness.
This dolmen, however, is not just any dolmen. A nice dolmen, it is true, although taciturn, both under the sun and under the moon. Its expression is elsewhere. Culminating like a podium at 107 meters above the level of the Gironde, this puy appears as the second point in altitude of its corner of the country, looking affectionately below the lands of Pomerol and Saint-Émilion, with which it shares its soils of clay and limestone with starfish.
His expression is elsewhere, yes. More precisely under its mineral belly, where the breadth, even the depth of its terroir is revealed, a real sensitive and living biotope embracing even more widely a biodiversity carefully watched over by 15 generations of winegrowers, and this, since the year 1610. could it be that the patina of the centuries has in no way altered the wine that has sprung from this soil for all this time, discreetly storing it in turn sheltered from fashions and other effects linked to the climatic upheavals in progress?
lighthouse keepers
Françoise, Adrien, Pascal and Jean-Pierre Amoreau are convinced of this. Custodians of exceptions, here they are in turn guardians, but lighthouse keepers this time, sweeping with the revolving light of their innermost convictions the clear path of a 16e generation to come at the service of wine and the land that nourishes it. Here, in this kingdom installed on the hillside of Wonders, earthworms are kings. Welcome to Chateau Le Puy.
The table (of stone) is set for the rest of things. Not that this sequel is cushy and predictable, but the craftsmen of Château Le Puy are keeping an eye on the grain. In a context where their approach in agroforestry, permaculture, polyculture and other polite cultivation of the territory, coupled with these simple observations of peasant common sense, already gives them a head start. They will need it. Because the decades to come, here as elsewhere, even more than the sum of the past centuries, will be much more demanding because of what you are already guessing. Even decisive.
The ecosystem, certainly fragile but here centered and very balanced, ensured on the 50 hectares of the estate, requires neither external supplements nor antibiotics, as if the vineyard, itself integrated into a kind of biodiverse autarky, had not to invent illnesses that he does not have. With a little imagination, we could argue that our benevolent dolmen, in a wider range of action, itself exerts a dynamic (in the biodynamic sense of the term) whose properties have implications that are certainly scientifically difficult to quantify, but all the same very relevant, among the many cuvées that the house offers us.
Among these cuvées, the estate’s flagship, this Emilian 2019 approved under the Vin de France appellation ($34 – 709469 – (5+) © ★★★ 1/2). A timeless, ageless bottle of universal significance, which alone integrates the memory of previous cuvées and the anticipation of those to come in this kind of continuum inscribed within the cycle of an endless circular movement. . As if he were renewing himself, remembering where he came from, knowing who he is, in a “here and now” that is both still and expansive. A compendium of the universe on its own.
Savoring Le Puy soothes and enchants. We are not jostled there, but rocked. We are not apathetic, but immediately caught up, under the song of Merlots (here for 85% of the score) to make jealous all these sirens having to serine at the bedside of more sterile and standardized cuvées. This red stripped of all accessories, if not of its fruit, is an antidote to men’s lies, swagger, pretentiousness and pride. If there were a Nobel Prize for wine, there is no doubt that the Amoreau family would win the honours. For services rendered to life!