The Cellar of Pierre Breton

Dinner time. We drive through the dark – a forest, a tiny village, the power station with its solid plumes of steam reaching like cotton wool columns into the sky. We are going to someone’s house to have dinner with Catherine and Pierre Breton, makers of amazing Cabernet Franc and completely delicious Chenin Blanc.

It isn’t really a private home. Rather, it is a house which has been turned into a restaurant but with the chef and his wife serving you in a large room off the kitchen, this is what it feels like. The Chef is portly but still rather good looking in a dishevelled kind of way and his wife is friendly but essentially rather harassed.

Wouldn’t you be with a room full of strangers just off your kitchen?

We sit at a long table almost the size of the room which also houses a sofa, television and dresser full of haphazard crockery. Pierre starts to open his wines and eventually, some water arrives.

He explains that they would normally cook for us at their home but that they are absolutely exhausted after the end of the harvest, when they were feeding armies of pickers on a daily basis. I must say, neither of them look exhausted. Catherine nods and beams at us all as Pierre speaks and he is sprightly as you like in his natty red polo neck. He is irrepressibly twinkly and incorrigibly flirty with everyone.

We drink the 2009 Pet Natt which has only just now started sparkling after months of just lying there, taking life easy in bottle. Such is the world of natural yeast. They take a break when they feel like it.

We could learn from this.

The wine, incidentally, is delicious. The yeast has obviously returned to work with great commitment. Sweet-ish but fabulously fresh at the same time, redolent of honey and wax. This is still fermenting and so rich, yeasty flavours are to the fore; extra deliciousness.

We are going to have a simple meal, we are told. Simple suits me.

Oysters first, already on the table when Florian and I return from the cellar, a temperature controlled room just off the main restaurant bit, neatly piled with treasures from the Loire. I have with me Romaratin from Claude Courtois (we know we love his son’s wines so I want to taste the father’s).

I have two of the shellfish, both jolting iodine hits straight from the sea. Then great tureens, steaming, piled with mussels, start to arrive in the wife’s meaty hands. She is closely followed by another very smiley lady bearing that most beautiful of things – platters of proper, homemade chips.

This is a feast. My notebook is spattered with the different sauces – curry, tomato, white wine. I eat piles and piles of chips. They are utterly sublime.

The Romaratin is good. I didn’t make very careful notes because I was too hungry and the mussels (and the wine) were good enough to go to my head: it did not have the haunting quality of his son’s Menu Pineau, but there was texture and complexity and, of course, purity.

Pierre and Catherine’s son joins us. He is completely lovely. 17, lanky with a mop of red hair, he speaks good English and moves around the table, shaking hands with all of us and introducing himself, then he flops down next to Holly and starts to flirt shamelessly with her.

We eat and eat and drink and laugh a lot. This is how a meal should be. We talk about dancing (which Pierre had done, on the bar in the front room, the week before), travel (his son is looking to work abroad. We try to entice him to London but he is dismissive; he wants New York) and of course great wine.

Pierre has brought his 1997 Bourgeuil which is tasting incredible. Still highly perfumed and youthful, fruit in abundance but something herbal as well. The acidity remains box fresh, washing down the copious chips I just can’t stop eating.

And they keep coming. The wife is getting hotter and more flustered looking with every plateful but still they come.

Pierre believes that most Bourgueil is ready at 10 – 15 years and that it can carry on for 20 plus, from a good vintage, stored correctly etc. Certainly, this wine has held together and is not nearly over.

Eventually, we must stop eating mussels. It is a question of storage space – there is only so much one’s stomach can cope with if one is to remain civilized. Dessert is a kind of apple pizza – caramalised slices of fruit on a very thin, extra crunchy base. There is a hint of butter and of course sugar, but not too much at all. I crunch through an inordinate amount of that too. Probably needless to say, this is fantastic with the dregs of the Pett Nat.

Back to the hotel, past the ever present pillars of steam at the power station, to sleep like a log.

The next day is neither as cold or as clear as it has been. Chilly with a leaden sky. We drive to the Breton farm and Pierre meets us in the yard; still dapper in his Barbour type jacket. Back in the cars (he comes with us) we drive down narrow dirt lanes between vineyards, to a small copse about a mile from his house. He has said that we are going to his cellar, but where are we, exactly?

On foot, we walk down a lane between the trees. At the end of it, a dark mouth yawns black among the green foliage but Pierre turns off just before this, down a very narrow passage to a hidden door set in a wall of solid stone.

This has got to be the most charmed cellar in the world. We duck under the low doorway into a room of stone. An ancient buckled wooden table, the same warm tone as the walls stands at the far end and to the left is another low door.

This leads to the cellar proper. Carved out of the solid limestone with a gravel floor, the barrels pocked with splodges of mould, rest heavily. This, says, Pierre, is where he comes, to ‘put his feet back into earth’. I can’t think of a better place to so such a thing.

Here, among the resting wine, we get some history. Pierre’s great grandparents made wine but by the time of his parents, it was impossible to make money just from this; grapes were only part of a polyculture and were sold to the local co-op. Thankfully for us all, they decided to keep the vineyards and he took over in 1986 and started making changes.

This is the heart of Cabernet Franc country, the 15km by 6 km  which make up Bourgeuil. Pinot Noir is totally unsuited to this terroir – 100km from the sea, it remains too humid.

“Still, there is a little piece of salt in the wind and the rain”

Here, they get the wind from the northwest and have to hunt for sites that have the light and warmth to ripen the Franc. Traditionally, vineyards always had limestone walls around them to absorb and then reflect back both of these things. The best soils are gravel or limestone with two different types of clay and they grow grapes on both of these.

Pierre met Marcel Lapierre, the tragically recently deceased, Godfather of natural wine, in 1987 and decided to follow natural wine making from then, a mere year into his career. He is therefore as dyed in the wool of this discipline as it is possible to be, never really having got involved in the alternative.

He speaks of ageing in barrel. Here in the Loire, they like the 500 – 600 litre size and for the likes of him, it must be old. He believes (and I heartily concur) that new oak renders the sinewy elegance of Loire Cabernet Franc null and void, turning it into altogether a clunky creature.

Barrels, says Pierre, are a lot of work. Cleaning them is amazingly labour intensive (but utterly necessary for wines untainted by bad organisms). You must also watch over them constantly; taste and taste again. Listen and learn. Cabernet Franc needs a lot of oxygen and some therefore turn to micro-oxygenation which in turn gives a gloss which somehow lacks authenticity. Pierre prefers the old fashioned method. Let it lie in wood and stone, softly, slowly breathing. Give it time.

We taste a range of 2009’s. A great vintage – very mature fruit with very manageable alcohol levels. Pierre has not chaptalised since 1994 and has used no sulphur in the wine making process since 1993. The wines – a range from his different vineyards, some fermented to be soft (using Carbonic maceration) and some chewier (and these will stay in barrel for 18 months instead of around 12) - are raw, pure and delicious. Life affirming.

We taste his Chinon straight after a run of Bourgeuil and the difference is stark – much rounder, smoother edges; velvet to the corduroy of the latter.

The atmosphere in this place is thick with the low buzz of resting life in the barrels, laid over the base notes of energy found in places actually in the earth. The peace is palpable and addictive. I want to find a corner, curl up and stay forever. We look up at the limestone roof of the cave. Steel pegs jut from the rock here and there, reinforcements that Pierre had installed some time ago, lest the stone sky fall on his head.

Apparently, he once had a party in this cellar (although will not do so again as it is best kept as a place of quiet meditation). He was very drunk. Staring up at the ceiling while his guests revelled around him. He noticed slight but unmistakeable movement.

He turned to the woman next to him and informed her that they were all, almost certainly, going to shortly be dead, felled mid celebration by several tons of stone. Given this, it was probably best that the two of them exchanged a passionate kiss.

She laughed, carried on drinking and did not kiss him.

I was confused. “Do you mean you were speaking to your wife?” I asked.

He looked at me as though I was excessively simple minded.

“Of course not,” he replied.

The next week, he got an engineer to come and look at the roof and sure enough, the stone was moving. Pegs were installed forthwith.

Finally, reluctantly, we must leave the cellar. We drive back to the house, a long; low building which is typical of the area. They were built like this because of the winds from the north west which are particularly strong here.

We pop into the tasting room here, briefly. Catherine is entertaining some tourists who have stopped to taste and buy. Then into their kitchen for what is described as a snack. There are two types of terrine, both made by Catherine and both, apparently, utterly delicious. Coarse and rich, one I notice is studded with prunes. Russell, the chef in the group, highly approves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is also a whole side of Spanish ham from which Pierre slices slivers, three types of goats cheese and an endless supply of very fresh, very crunchy baguette. Their son reappears, solemnly does the rounds of the table again, this time kissing everyone formally on both cheeks. He replenishes bread baskets, wolfs down something heated in the microwave and disappears once more.

Pierre finally sits down but does not eat. He is feeling tired today he says. He had to get up very early to make sure that everything was ok for our visit. We talk about a bottle of 1985 which he has opened, the first wine he ever made. This is fully mature today and has, he reckons, about another two years before it “falls down”. It certainly isn’t doing so today – truffles, pencil lead and even red fruit are still very much in evidence although the structure has been worn to a smooth sheen. Very lovely drinking right now.

We must go – we have a train to catch to Paris and then another back to London. Another great advantage of the Loire – it is a region you can easily visit without getting on a plane.

I can say, without any hesitation, that this has been and remains one of my all time favourite regions in the entire world of wine. My personal taste always pertains to deft elegance in wines and I would chose that over brawn any day. These all have elegance in abundance; even the reds which show an earthy intensity. Even with these, there is a lightness of touch.

There is a style to suit every mood and every occasion here and a wealth of varieties far beyond the commercial. And to make that position irrevocably unassailable, it is also home to an important and growing band of natural wine makers. Truly, I completely love the Loire.