Deboutbertin "Achillee"
Regular price $54.00
Unit price per
Grapes : Chenin
Region: Loire, France
Vintage: 2019
Viticulture: Organic
Soils: Quartz
Aging: 18 months in barrel
Fining or Filtering: None
Sulfur: None
Notes from the Importer: Stéphanie Debout and Vincent Bertin (hence Deboutbertin) met at university while studying engineering. They moved to Paris, but quickly became disillusioned with city life and pined for the countryside. One of their friend’s fathers, Jean-Philippe Fichet, is a winemaker in Burgundy, and on a trip to visit him they became entranced by his passion for the craft of winemaking. That was that. They decided to go and do a vintage with a winemaker in the Loire in 2011 to test the waters, and in Stéphanie’s words, it was love at first sight. They had fallen for the vigneron life. By 2012, they had handed in their resignation notices, bought a house and a vineyard, and signed up for winemaking school.
For them, the most important thing is the overall health of their vineyards. This has brought them to agroforestry, and they now interplant their vineyards with trees. In doing so, they break the monocultural mould of the vineyard, instead creating an area in which other species of plants can thrive. This is a young couple who demonstrate vinous minimalism in the best way possible. These are pure wines of soul that have nothing added, nothing taken away.
Stéphanie and Vincent produce this wine from 0.77 ha of 30yo vines located in Faye d’Anjou, grown on a north tilting plateau with 30cm topsoil where rhyolites (a heavy primary rock comprising iron, magnesium, feldspar and quartz) are dominant. Yield is a low 25hh, grapes are very slowly pressed, the juice is transferred into old barrels for a slow-paced fermentation and 18 months élevage, the finished wine is bottled without fining, filtration or sulphur. Slightly reduced when young, it offers dense confit citrus fruits and pear on the palate with a hint of spice, great balance with a mineral vibration.