Decanter World Home News Wine People & Places Learning Events Shopping Collecting Subscribe Wine Awards Wine News Wine Blogs Wine Videos Wine Pictures

U S A F E S T I V A L . N E T The largest open event collector site of the States!

You are here: Decanter News Wine Blogs Jefford on Monday Prev Enter keywords here... search Apr 07:03 by Andrew Jefford Add comment Jefford on Monday 20 Jefford on Monday: Out of Bounds

Like 2 Tweet 10 0 Share 14

Is there a conflict between brand and terroir? Can you express terroir in a brand without using appellation as a primary focus? Here’s a story. Award-winning writer Andrew Jefford's Monday column on Decanter.com Webfeed Print

Regular bloggers

Andrew Jefford All bloggers

Domaine de la Verriere. Image credit: Victor Saez Sommelier for Wine A Frenchman grew up on a sink estate near Paris, took his intelligence and Events talent abroad, and prospered. His parents retired to the South of France, Turn-Key Wine and on a visit to them he once saw a yellowing monochrome photograph of a Tastings, Seminars, dilapidated property sellotaped, with dismal optimism, to an estate agent’s Receptions, Dinners, New York Join us window. 'For some reason, I clicked.' City at Decanter He went back two weeks later; the property had been on the market for so and Save long that the agent had lost the papers, and couldn’t remember who the owners were. The expat Frenchman left his card. Around six months later, 30% the dilatory agent finally rang him back with the missing details. SUBSCRIBE NOW >> It was a wine domain in a pitiful state – poorly cared-for vines, tenant- farmed, and the house full of sheep dung. But these are matters that an Related content international banking career can rectify, and Xavier Rolet and his American wife Nicole Sierra-Rolet duly turned the estate into something well-tended Interview: Jean- and exquisite, called Chene Bleu. They live for most of the time in London: Manuel Jacquinot of Xavier Rolet is now CEO of the London Stock Exchange. I talked to the Champagne Jacquinot couple recently at the Stock Exchange headquarters, a short stroll from St & Fils Paul’s Cathedral.

converted by Web2PDFConvert.com These details will have given you the wrong impression: wealthy absentee Faustino releases owners, and employees doing all the work. In fact Chene Bleu is very much a Rioja Chardonnay decanter.com family affair. Xavier Rolet took a year off to study at the Wine University at Like Suze-la-Rousse, and is fascinated by the geological complexity of the place; Vega Sicilia to release Nicole Rolet (who had a distinguished career of her own in international Rioja wine 48,837 people like decanter.com. policy institutes, publishing and banking) runs the estate with more passion and personal commitment than many fourth-generation vignerons. Xavier’s sister Benedicte oversees the vineyards (with help from Claude and Lydia Rated Discussed Bourguignon), and Benedicte’s husband Jean-Louis Gallucci is winemaker (with help from both Philippe Cambie and Zelma Long). This 135-ha estate Jefford on (with 23 ha in production) is like a longed-for, much-loved baby. Monday: Farewell Jef Facebook social plugin But it happens to lie where four different appellations meet (Gigondas, Cotes du Rhone-Villages-Seguret, Ventoux and the IGP Vaucluse) and Jefford on Monday: where no fewer than seven political divisions intersect (Gigondas, Seguret, All The Figures That's Vaison la Romaine, Malaucene, Crestet, Lafare and Beaumes de Venise). For Fit To Print the Rolets, Chene Bleu is self-evidently uniform: 'What interested me from Jefford on Monday: Join the the get-go,' says Xavier, 'was its secluded location and its unique Bordeaux's Yield environment as a nature reserve and a protected part of Mont Ventoux.' Yet Riddle conversation nature itself has no boundaries; they are a human effort to interpret nature. Follow @Decanter The boundaries, at Chene Bleu, make a mess. 0 Latest expert posts 'We could have done a little bit of everything,' Xavier remembered. 'But we weren’t able to reconcile the style of the wines with the appellation Apr Jefford on possibilities. So we said – let’s do a brand.' Forget turning leaves or hills in 20 Monday: Out of blossom; being the Rolets, the brand they came up with was an intellectually Bounds intriguing one, based on the celebrated and largely tragic love affair between a twelfth-century scholastic theologian (later castrated, by thugs) Apr Jefford on and one of his students. 13 Monday: Dying a slow death... 'My brother-in-law and I spent days trying understand what was the best way to express what was there,' remembers Nicole. 'We tried initially to put all our best red into one brand, but we ended up feeling that what is most Apr Jefford on characteristic of our terroir is this tension, this juxtaposition between the 6 Monday: Briskness in the air Latest poll very Northern Rhone and Southern Rhone personalities. We tried to put all You may have heard of a new wine gadget selling of that phenolic tension into one wine, but it made a bit of a cacophony. It Mar Jefford on for just under US$300 called 'Coravin' which was more interesting to show the two faces of the vineyard – the more claims to allow wine to be tasted multiple times masculine, southern Rhone side and more northern Rhone Syrah-restrained 30 Monday: Angela’s Lemon from the same bottle without ever removing the style. So how do you communicate that? A man and a woman, a couple; cork. Are you... they’re connected but they’re separate. And we came to Abelard and Intrigued. It sounds like a great idea and I would be Mar Jefford on Heloise because of the fact that they were both serious people, and the interested in buying one (1263 vote, 29%) wines we felt had a certain gravitas.' 23 Monday: What’s a perfect berry? Cautious, I would have to see it in action before I Abelard, thus, is a Grenache-dominant blend, and Heloïse a Syrah- made my mind up (1239 vote, 28%) dominant blend (with a little Viognier). There is also a younger drinking red Mar Jefford on named after the couple’s child, Astrolabe; a rosé with no particular name; 16 Monday: Beyond Sceptical, I wouldn't risk it with my old and rare and a white called Aliot, named after a local fifteenth-century glassblower. the five booms vintages (687 vote, 16%) Not interested - if I want a glass of wine I'll just open The ‘contemporary medieval’ branding is very strong, not least due to the the bottle (1179 vote, 27%) beautiful engravings of Jane Randfield, used on labels and website; the Section Archive wines are sumptuous and finely crafted, and sell internationally at prices April, 2015 See all polls most Ventoux producers can only dream about. Does the terroir shine, thanks to the backlight of branding, or does the strength of the brand cast March, 2015 terroir in the shade? February, 2015 Competitions January, 2015 Win tickets to Foodies Festival, As I said to the Rolets when I met them, the branding strikes me as so forceful and so attractive that it occludes terroir; and to me the two main December, 2014 at a choice of UK destinations reds are too stylistically close to one another to work in the way that the November, 2014 Decanter has teamed up with Foodies Festival to offer five conceptual contrast implies (Nicole says that this is not the general October, 2014 lucky readers a pair of tickets each, at... reaction). But what would I have done in their place? September, 2014 More Competitions There is a sense in which even the purest and most fugitive of terroir August, 2014 concepts has a branding force – yet terroir means the infinite articulation of July, 2014 difference, which in itself is anti-brand. Bordeaux First Growths may be June, 2014 Find a Wine Club or brands – yet they also vary greatly according to vintage; they differ May, 2014 significantly from one another thanks to appellation and site; and their Wine Merchant quality is predicated on terroir. Without that terroir presence, these ‘brands’ would simply not exist.

I would, I suppose, have sought the maximum levels of difference the vineyards are capable of expressing, and struggled to express those differences via the fragmented boundaries – because consumers are used to

converted by Web2PDFConvert.com searching for terroir differences through appellations (which are surrogate brands as well as collective property rights). That, of course, might well have been the wrong choice.