DIALOGUE with
Sarah Jane Evans MW

Xavier:  All our wines are grown, hand-picked, made and matured on the estate, the Domaine de La Verrière.  Our Domaine lies in a privileged spot - a secluded mountain saddle above the little village of Crestet, north-east of Avignon, in the Dentelles de Montimirail mountains.  We are on the northern face of the Mont St Amand, above Gigondas, in the foothills of Mont Ventoux, Provence’s highest mountain. 

Xavier:  The property lies at 550m, almost 1600ft, making us one of the highest vineyards in the Vaucluse, and in the South of France.  The rolling slopes, facing south to the Mont St Amand and south-east to Mont Ventoux, are dominated by the unmistakable, jagged peaks of the limestone Dentelles, which means ‘lace’ in French.  From the back of the winery, an uninterrupted panorama opens up to the valley of Vaison-la-Romaine and the fertile plains of the Drôme.  I never tire of the view.

Xavier:  Yes, and UNESCO recognized the benefit of that isolation, when it designated the region a Biosphere Reserve.  Our Domaine is ringed by a pine and oak forest, protecting the vines from pollution.  It is a wildlife haven.

Xavier:  The Domaine lies in a very special place, just where the Rhône and Provence Appellations meet on the southern border of Gigondas.  Our high altitude terroir of limestone and clay is unique and exceptional.  I find the winemakers and experts who come to visit get very excited!  The purity of the environment also means that we can work according to biodynamic principles, creating a healthy, vibrant vineyard.

Nicole:  You are very conscious of the presence of eleven centuries of history at La Verrière.  The Domaine has been connected with wine since the Middle Ages, when it was a grape-growing dependency of the Abbaye of Prebayon.  In 1427, Aliot de Montvin was licensed to blow glass there - hence its name of La Verrière. 

Xavier:  I had been looking for some time for a property in the area.  In 1993, I stumbled across a faded photo in an estate agency.  The Domaine had been abandoned because of disagreements about inheritance.  It had been on the market for many years and no one wanted to put in the work to restore it.  I was intrigued and went up to take a look.  The house was derelict and the vineyards needed a lot of care.  It was a very popular place for ramblers and artists of local and international repute, including King Charles III, who painted the house in 1989 when he was still the Prince of Wales.

Xavier: I’m a Frenchman and, as a child, my happiest times were spent in the country, with my grandparents, learning to fish.  I’ve spent much of my life working in big cities but the country always feels like home to me.

Xavier:  I appreciate fine wine so I looked forward to fixing up the vineyard. In doing so we gradually discovered, with the help of specialists, that our terroir was a diamond in the rough.  It was not until we had this validation from objective outside experts that we felt ready to take the next step.  Only then did we cross the Rubicon and commit ourselves wholeheartedly to propelling this project to such ambitious goals.  We began to feel that we had a moral obligation to revive our vines and to lead them to express the maximum potential of their extraordinary site and capture that through the winemaking process.

Nicole:  Chêne Bleu, the ‘Blue Oak’, is named after a magnificent ancient oak that presides over the vineyard and the priory buildings.

It suffered in the drought of 2005, so Marco Nucera, the internationally famed tree sculptor based in Provence, painted it with bouillie bordelaise (the ‘Bordeaux mixture’ of copper sulphate, traditionally used to protect vines).

The blue-green color of the treatment enhanced the beautiful structure and the enduring inner strength of its architecture. The result was to uncover an arresting piece of natural art. The Chêne Bleu became a fitting metaphor for our project, where we seek to preserve and protect the very essence of the site while showcasing its exceptional quality and character. We knew our magnificent oak tree would not be with us forever, and indeed it was taken down in a storm that hit hard in the winter of 2020. It long outlived our expectations, but we still felt like we lost a member of our extended family. We are now brainstorming about a way to pay ‘treebute’ to it.

Xavier:  An unwavering pursuit of quality, commitment to the environment and equal respect for tradition and innovation in everything we do.

Xavier:  It’s very straightforward: our objective is to create wines of exceptional quality - natural, refined and complex.  We have the great fortune to be in a privileged site, with a long history.  We want to respect and express the site’s natural attributes, whilst bringing the best ideas and practices available anywhere.

Nicole:  By applying an integrative approach that draws together the best ideas and resources from anyone who can bring wisdom to our vision, our project and our passion.  Hence our motto: Non mihi, non tibi, sed nobis.

Nicole:  Only as consumers! Once we “took our oath” to turn the vineyard around, we extended our wine appreciation through courses and frequent tastings.  Luckily we both love to study, because in this field, the need for knowledge knows no end!  We worked closely with leading viticulturists who advised us.  We were also pleased as punch when Jean-Louis and Bénédicte - Xavier’s brother-in-law and sister - armed with serious winemaking study, got involved.

Nicole:  Aut Caesar aut Nihil… Caesar or Nothing, as the saying goes.  There’s so much potential in the terroir that we could not imagine taking any half measures.  Chêne Bleu deserves extreme commitment, focus and dedication.  We were not keen to take on a project like this and not deliver on it.  Our ‘no shortcuts’ policy is inextricably intertwined with a personal belief in self-improvement.  To get the best results we take the view that we need to be determined, constantly questioning, forward-thinking and open-minded and we draw inspiration from respected practitioners around the world.

Xavier:  First and foremost, my deep love and respect for nature.

Xavier:  I have always felt passionate about working in a sustainable, non-invasive way, and never resting on our laurels.  I felt a great responsibility to restore and protect this privileged ecosystem, which includes the people involved, this has helped the vines to thrive!  It is our duty to make sure that the Domaine is managed well, to share it and to pass it on in good health to future generations. 

In every aspect of our work, our goal is to ensure that the vineyard, the winery and the people involved remain in a healthy, sustainable equilibrium with each other.  This is why we introduced exacting organic and biodynamic principles to the way we work.

Xavier: Our research has confirmed the importance of these practices in the management of a healthy vineyard.  We are constantly moving towards less interventionist practices, more in tune with the rhythms of nature.  Bénédicte avoids the use of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers, favoring natural ones such as our own compost on the vines and in the vegetable garden.  We welcome a flock of sheep over winter in the vineyards to provide weed-control as well as natural fertilizer.  It is remarkable to see the variety of insects, birds and animals that have returned since we eliminated chemicals.

Xavier:  We have the great fortune to have several natural springs on the property that collect water from the St Amand.  One of them was attributed miraculous properties for curing the blind in the Middle Ages.  Given that water – and the lack of it – is such a major global concern, we feel strongly that we should be leaders in good practices in water management, and it informs all our thinking.  I have planted an extensive stretch of bamboo to manage waste water naturally.

Xavier:  We continue to work to reduce and offset our carbon footprint, to grow our commitment to recycling and to improve our understanding of the functioning of the spectacular natural environment that surrounds us.

Xavier:  There are plenty.  For instance, we’re also developing a natural alternative to pesticides by using propolis from my bees!  It’s only a start; sustainability is a long journey.

Xavier: ‘Not mine, not yours, but ours.’ We chose this motto as it expresses the interactive philosophy at the heart of our work. As with a great bottle of wine, the pleasure is magnified by sharing. We take great pleasure in sharing Chêne Bleu and La Verrière with those who appreciate them.

Nicole:  At the source there was Xavier.  He discovered this diamond-in-the-rough, was seduced by it and committed to doing whatever was needed to unleash its potential. Today we contribute in different ways to the wines, but we share the commitment and the contagious passion.

Nicole:  Actually, our whole team is viscerally involved in what we’re trying to accomplish.  La Verrière is a place where people come together and share the best of themselves, and I’m convinced that comes through in the wine — the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  Each one of us is part of La Verrière’s ecosystem.  And we’re keen to continue sharing our experience and exchanging knowledge and ideas with other passionate people.  You never stop learning and growing as long as you retain humility and an open mind, and you’re not afraid of hard work!

Nicole: There is a very inclusive dimension to our project, as reflected in our motto.  I have been thrilled by the integrative experience of our project.  That’s to say: for some, wine is simply business; for others, it’s purely art.  For us it’s a multidisciplinary opportunity to pull together the best of the place and the team to express our collective life experiences and values.

Xavier:  My professional life has always been in the international financial arena in the USA and the UK.  However, I am a Frenchman by birth and the happiest parts of my youth were spent in the countryside, which is what drew me so strongly to La Verrière.  I love this land and its soothing constancy - a perfect antidote to the thrills and stresses of the financial markets.

Xavier:  Actually, it represents the chance crossroads between four factors: a life-long enjoyment of nature, my longstanding appreciation of wine, the chance opportunity to purchase this estate and a gradual realization of the potential of the terroir and, with that, the compulsion to create something exceptional.

Xavier:  My professional responsibilities keep me elsewhere, but I am very fortunate that my wife and close family have taken such an interest in the project so that I can entrust it to them.  Twenty years ago, I could never have guessed that today they would be so deeply absorbed in the production of fine wines from a state-of-the-art winery.  This gives me peace of mind that they are carrying forward our vision better than I could ever have hoped.

Xavier:  As an enthusiastic consumer, although members of my family have been successful wine producers for several generations.  I highly recommend their Rolet Arbois, the famous wine of the Jura, the Crémant Rolet, also from the Jura, and the Michel Laroppe wines from Côtes de Toul, north of Champagne.

Xavier:  Yes! And it has also for our committed team.  We are determined to produce the very best wines as an expression of our exceptional terroir.  We are also creating a healthy, sustainable environment for us all, as anyone who has spent time at La Verrière can testify.

Nicole:  I manage all the activities beyond the viticulture and winemaking.  I make the link between Chêne Bleu and the outside world, traveling to exchange ideas and share our wines with others who share our passion.

Nicole:  My professional life was in publications, banking and think-tanks in the USA and in the UK.  My parents are French-Italian and American.  As a child, I attended French lycées in New York and Milan and I have also spent time in Germany, Spain and Brazil.   From my parents, I inherited a strong appreciation of different cultures, and a willingness to look for the best of anything everywhere.

Nicole:  I was gradually seduced by the project and drawn into its orbit – it was a bit like being mysteriously drawn up into the mountain in Picnic at Hanging Rock!  Initially intrigued, I eventually decided to devote all my energies to the success of the venture.  Today, my passion for it knows no bounds.

Nicole: At Vassar College, I discovered my lifelong love of learning, which gave me the courage to take the plunge and “re-engineer” my professional goals from international relations, public policy and finance into those of a wine professional.  In pursuit of this, I have attended various levels of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust certificates, and the Wine Executive course at UC Davis in California, but the best learning has been in the winery, with Jean-Louis, our winemaker, my brother-in-law.

Jean-Louis:  Like good wine, it’s a blend - hard work at all hours, observation, and tasting, tasting, tasting, and then tasting again. I believe it is also really important to be open-minded and flexible, so I listen to and take the lead from the wines. 

Jean-Louis:  In winemaking, I am endlessly enchanted by the fascinating relationship between art and science.  I have much to learn from talking with the world-class oenologists who advise us, but in the end, I listen to the wines.  They love to tell their story, talk about their moods and sometimes, like children, they scream for attention!

Jean-Louis:  My father’s family comes from Italy, my mother’s family are from the Loire, and used to make wine in the Vouvray Appellation. 

I myself was born and brought up in Nice, where I studied management and accounting.  However, I was bitten by the winemaking bug when I moved to live at La Verrière with my wife Bénédicte, who is Xavier’s sister, in 1998.  I feel that I have ‘returned to my roots.’

Jean-Louis:  I went to college to study the theories of oenology and viticulture, and to build on my natural tasting abilities.  I then worked in various Domaines: in the Côtes du Rhône at Domaine St Claude, in Châteauneuf-du-Pape with top producer Domaine de la Charbonnière, and in Côtes du Ventoux at Domaine Champlong with Christian Gely, who is one of the leaders of that specific Appellation.

Bénédicte:  You have to be thoughtful, attentive and committed in your work.  Nowhere is our “no shortcuts” philosophy as exacting and exhausting as in the vineyard.  If you ever are tempted to cut corners, you pay for it at harvest time and beyond! Conversely, the vines come to need you and love you, and reward you with their best fruit. 

Bénédicte:  You need real physical strength, but stamina is just as important.  It’s demanding, non-stop work, going out in all weathers.  It gets really cold, windy and snowy here in the winter, and it can be 40 degrees in summer.  I also think you have to be really meticulous.  I need to know each vine as well as I know our children, and treat each one as an individual.

Bénédicte:  No - you also have to be a whiz at doing your own tractor and equipment repairs.  We’re so isolated there’s no one to come and help out.  It’s tough on the hands — I hope the Queen of England doesn’t come to check my nails!

Xavier:  We are blessed with a confluence of natural factors.  Being so far south, on the same latitude as Gigondas, we have more than 300 sunny days in the year.  The fruit ripens deliciously and does not suffer from rot.  The vines enjoy regular exposure to the Mistral and other winds that assist in flavor concentration, but our hilly topography spares us from the full force of the blast and the local mini-tornadoes.

Bénédicte:  Our altitude, our isolation and our soil.  The altitude (550m/1600ft) gives the variation in temperature between day and night that is essential for fruit quality.  Essentially, our grapes ripen more slowly with better flavor development, but the later harvest (up to 3 weeks after our neighbors in the valley) makes them prey to the weather.  Fortunately, many years it can work in our favor.  

Xavier:  It protects the land from pollution and agricultural hazards which is important when running a vineyard on biodynamic principles.  However, all our vineyards are no further than 12 minutes from the winery sorting tables so we can keep the grapes in the finest condition.

Xavier:  The rich mineral content.  The distinctive structure of our soil with its basalt content provides a signature to all the Chêne Bleu wines, regardless of varietal or winemaking.  The tectonic activity that led to the creation of Mont Ventoux and its foothills has eroded over time, revealing a diverse cross-section of geological strata containing components from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.  The blend creates a very interesting cocktail of minerals.  This in turn adds complexity and a mineral signature to all our wines.  The topsoil is clay and chalk with plenty of unforgiving, sharp-edged stones. 

Xavier:  Because we are one of the highest vineyards in Provence, the flora is an interesting mix of highly perfumed Mediterranean and alpine species: lots of wild thyme and rosemary, lavender, various pines and conifers and succulent plants. 

Xavier:  The scraggy, tough old vines were both a blessing and a hindrance.  The gnarly toughness makes them ready to withstand extreme conditions, but most had to be retrained.  We re-evaluated every single vine, then repicketed and redrew the vineyards to achieve maximum quality and individuality.

Bénédicte:  I have a continuing program of replanting, as well as planting new varietals.  We changed to the double cordon method, which allows better canopy management and control of sunlight to the fruit.  To regenerate the vineyard we like to use the traditional system of massal selection from our old vines - we take cuttings from the best vines, rather than bringing in commercial clones.  We aim to select the low yielding vines to give us the quality that comes from concentrated fruit.

Make no mistake; it’s rough, rugged terrain.  The work is really back-breaking and the four distinct seasons take their toll.  We prune by hand, and pay close attention to the vines throughout the year. 

Bénédicte:  We pick the fruit entirely by hand, placing the whole bunches carefully into shallow crates so that the berries remain whole and keep their ripe juice.  We have worked so hard with the grapes all year; we are not going to damage them at the last minute!

Bénédicte:  We have separated the vineyard into mini-parcelles to capture the identity of each different sector of the soil.  I treat each one individually.  I dislike synthetic fertilizers and chemicals and use organic treatments such as sheep manure and our own compost as well as sulfur and copper in minimum doses.  We use half the usual amount of copper.  We are also working towards managing the whole estate in accordance with biodynamic principles.

Jean-Louis: Biodynamics is based on the writings of Rudolf Steiner.  It’s effectively an approach to managing the soil and the vines in accordance with the influence of the phases of the moon, and it involves treating with something akin to small doses of natural treatments as in homeopathy.  All our work in the vineyard is organized around working on agriculturally auspicious days earmarked in the biodynamic calendar.

We also follow this calendar in the cellar when racking of the wines – and of course when tasting, if we can.  We are always interested in experimenting with natural treatments for the vines, such as one based on propolis from bees in our apiary which we are testing in a selected “parcelle”.  It’s all part of our ‘no shortcuts’ philosophy.

Xavier:  Once we realized the potential of our unique site, and once the vineyards started to thrive, we were driven to build a winery worthy of the commitment we had made to the grapes.  Given the attention lavished on the vines, it was fundamental that we carried this through to the wines.  It was inescapable.  We had to do it properly; I don’t believe in half-measures.  It’s like anything that you take seriously: you can’t act selectively when it’s convenient. 

Jean-Louis:  Hand-harvesting, double-selection, gravity flow in the winery, small tanks to vinify each mini-block separately, a combination of oak, concrete and stainless steel tanks, scrupulous hygiene and storage, extensive fine-tuning of barrel choices to add distinction to top quality wines and bottling according to the biodynamic calendar on ‘fruit’ and ‘flower’ days.

Xavier:  When it was clear that building an outstanding winery was our next essential task, we spent several years with renowned advisers visiting some of the most impressive wineries in the world and studying their equipment and layout.

Xavier:  We then designed and equipped the winery specifically for small batches, hand-crafted high quality winemaking.  Our determination is to ensure meticulous nurturing of the grapes at every stage.  We decided to design a building that moved the grapes and the wine through the gentle flow of gravity, without pumping.  We were insistent on not disrupting the landscape.  2006 was the first vintage we made in the winery.

Jean-Louis:  Chêne Bleu has one of the highest wineries in the Vaucluse Department, and in Provence.  It was a huge project.  We were able to use the topography to create just what we wanted.  We needed 4 levels, so we dug a hole 12m [36ft] deep and nestled the top two storeys against a hill.  Architect Gilles Gregoire and project manager Raynald Baty of En Volume oversaw the construction.

It sounds easy but it was an enormous piece of work digging into solid rock.  We used the stones they excavated as the base of the helicopter pad.  We used special materials instead of the usual reinforced concrete to avoid the ‘Faradic cage effect’.  This, named after the 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday, describes the potential for electromagnetic energy to be trapped inside the structure, potentially affecting the wine.