Interview with Anselme Selosse

In 1974 when I came back to the estate, there weren’t two ways of practicing viticulture. One that respected the environment and the other that respected it less. Our viticulture had evolved as science had moved forward, and no one questioned that progress. So that was the introduction since the very start of the 1960s, when chemical synthetic molecules substituted chemical – when I say synthetic chemistry I mean organic chemistry – mineral chemistry molecules.

So we had Bordeaux mix or copper acetate or other things like that, but people were unaware at the time, we were promised that science would liberate people and winegrowers from the difficult constraints that they were facing at a time when Champagne was going through a difficult period.

The vineyard I took over used chemicals. I don’t know, perhaps at the time there was, but we didn’t actually use it, DDT or organochloride molecules which were very harmful.

I lost my father at the beginning of 1985 and since 1976 I began using herbicides less and less, so he wasn’t really aware.

I encountered more difficulties with my family, they said ‘your father would never have done that, do you understand? You’re abandoning the vine, you’re neglecting the vine’. I wasn’t talking about organic viticulture, but rather allowing nature to express itself. But they saw it as lazy winegrowing. I had to really fight against my family rather than against my father.

Yes I felt like that. I felt alone, but I didn’t see as something negative or a drawback. When you read the small pink book that Christelle gave you, you’ll understand that during my youth I had to extract myself from groups, because of my physical characteristics.

So for me solitude, being alone, was a way of escaping danger and aggression. It actually made me different from others, and not to follow in other people’s footsteps. At the time, people thought I was extremely old-fashioned. People were talking about me as they talked about the motor industry from the 19th century, or sweaters knit for me by my grandma because I represented old school methods, how people grew the vineyards or made wine before the First World War.

I wasn’t striving to achieve anything in particular I just wanted to feel good about what I was doing.

When I was in Burgundy I was lucky enough to meet Jules Chauvet, unfortunately I didn’t work for him as an apprentice, but I was able to work with Max Léglise, who taught at the school in Beaujeu which was an important starting point in the 1980s for the vision of organic viticulture and vinification. Particularly Jules Chauvet trained Pierre Overnoy and Marcel Lapierre in sulphite-free winemaking.

During my training in Burgundy I also attended important animal and plant biology lessons, and that’s a subject I loved, because it covered nature, and it involved thinking about nature and how it works.

I was lucky enough to meet some people very early on. I met an architect called Christophe Huet. I remember something he said to me, he said ‘Stop looking at yourself while you work’. He meant that I should stop looking at myself and congratulating myself in my work, and listen more to nature.

Then I met other people who encouraged me, such as Dominique Denis, he’s not famous, and Michel Bettane who is famous. I also met Lucien Legrand who played an important role, so that was the person who founded Caves Legrand in Paris, rue Vivienne. He really believed in me, because we had huge difficulty selling. With his help buying our wines, I was really able to do more of what I wanted to do.

But a mentor who encouraged me to do something, no. But a series of several mentors yes, and that’s why I never spoke about revolution, it’s always been a constant and slow evolution.

The word ‘selfies’ has connotations of narcissism, and as I was telling you it’s what I was told, ‘Stop looking at yourself and how you work’.

Over 45 years, I quickly saw my work as one of a servant, and not as one of a producer. It was important. I learnt a lot through Asian philosophies such as Confucianism or Taoism or Buddhism, or a religion with no obligations or prohibitions. What matters is to look at nature as a benefit to be preserved.

For me, that was important and if I look at something, I’m not looking at myself, I’m looking at the individuals that I have protected or helped and how they shine.

The use of the solera system dates back to a trip I took to Spain in 1972, when I visited Penedès, Rioja and Andalusia. Of course the huge cathedrals of barrels I saw in Andalusia had a profound impact on me. In Rioja and Penedès too. I remember the visit I made with the Lopes de Heredia family at the Vino Tondonia estate. It obviously had a huge impact.

And in Andalusia they used a blending technique that actually feeds the flora so that it keeps on reproducing and protects the wine against biological aggression. I used this blending method to make an anti-vintage. A blend based on place.

It was important to me by using the solera method to show how important place is when making a wine, just as important as vintage.

In the past, the most important cuvées were those that showcased the vintage, not those that showcased the place.

I didn’t write it down, but I remember Mr Jean-Luc Barbier coming in from the CVC who said it was unacceptable to use the method in Champagne. Solera is for wines in Andalusia, in Spain, and you can’t use it.

That was one difficulty.

The other difficulty was financial. Managing to get a building and enough capital to store and produce only 10% of what we store.

That means we have 135 hl of solera reserve wine, not counting the wine from the new harvest.

There is just 13.5hl that we bottle each year. It means holding back capital and it’s one of the reasons why we moved.

In my career I’ve vinified in four different places, and I’ve moved three times.

I don’t know if the method has been applied for its original purpose, which is to make a blend based on place.

It has been copied using the term, because the term meant that you could set a high sale price. I often meet producers who talk about their solera cuvée and the older winemakers educate the younger ones.

That’s how they use it. I have never heard anyone say that they use a solera system to create an average blend of their vineyard parcels.

Some producers seek to value their production and I have a feeling that some people consider that it’s enough to display the name of a village on a bottle of champagne for it to be sold at a higher price.

If we structure ourselves like Burgundy, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t, we need to understand that there is a massive hierarchy system. There are Grand Crus in Burgundy that are of course sold individually. There are Premier Crus that are sold individually or blended. Then there are the villages which are a blend of wine from several villages, then there is the generic Bourgogne wine. The hierarchy system is important. In Burgundy only the very finest wine, 3% of the production, is sold with the name of the village displayed on the label.

There’s another thing to think about. You always have to be ready to change things and take a U-turn.

Gérard Chave, the father of Jean-Louis Chave always told me that for him, Hermitage is the culmination of the three terroirs, the three unique areas of the Hermitage that should be blended together. I would never produce an independent cuvée, because Hermitage is a collection.

The work done producing wines in different villages doesn’t depend on the seasons. They all depend on the seasons, but there are no differences between them.

At the moment it’s December, and we’re in a period when some of the wine is finishing its alcoholic fermentation and might go into malolactic fermentation.

It’s in the process of becoming disorganised. It’s breathing, it’s slowly oxidising itself. In chemistry it’s called mineralisation. It’s an important time because it’s similar to the sap. It’s getting closer to winter. It’s going to come under attack but it’s going to live, because living is about being attacked every day and it’s going to come out in the spring with a little experience, a little maturity and a confident expression of what it really is.

That’s what we expect, and that’s why we don’t taste before the spring. We taste at Easter because we say that the wine must ‘faire ses Pâques’, because that’s when the wine will start expressing itself.

You don’t taste the organic elements in the wine, which are its alcohol content, its sweetness, freshness, acidity. You taste a coherent whole that doesn’t deliver individual elements but expresses its personality, and that’s the most important thing.

If I had to describe the wines from the villages one by one, I’m taking them in random order, it’s not an hierarchy.
Chantraine is a wine that is full of charm. It has eastern exposure, which is birdsong, elegance, charm. Absolutely no power but plenty of depth. In Yiddish we’d say a mensch, a gentleman that doesn’t boast about how rich he is. You can see it, you can feel it.

Chemin de Châlons is Cramant, it’s south facing, on the lower part of the slope.

It’s an extrovert, cheerful, in a religion it would be a Benedictine rather than a Cistercian. Someone who loves talking and is very often smiling. Someone who is easy to talk to, but that doesn’t mean that they’re simple.

The third Chardonnay is Les Carelles, and that’s a steep south-facing slope. Les Carelles means the place where you can extract chalk blocks. Quarries. I believe that there is an idea of Perrières that you also find in Burgundy. It’s a place where on the palate, you can really experience the stones. Not the angular stones you find in Burgundy, but the limestone that tells you all about the rock, with plenty of astringency, and because it’s south-facing it has these toasted aromas that some attribute to the barrels, but it’s just the skin of the grapes that has defended itself against attacks from the sun, that has thickened itself and developed toasted notes.

There are elements of bitterness in the mouth that come from the toasted character: caramel and toast.

Out of the three Pinot Noirs. If you start at Aÿ, La Côte Faron has steep south-facing slopes. This doesn’t express itself in the same way as Les Carelles, even though it’s the same characteristics.

It takes some time to express itself. Côte Faron is never as good as it is after ten or fifteen years. There is also a certain distortion between the promise made by the nose, which is a smooth solar expression, you imagine that there’ll be autumn colours from this roundness, which can include candied fruit, dried flowers, etc. while in the mouth it can be quite vertical, maybe more severe, more developed, drier. It’s quite disturbing because what you imagined on the nose is expressed completely differently on the palate. Before we called it by the name of its village, we called it “contrast” because of this different between the place and the palate. This is Aÿ, the chalk isn’t split here, which is different from Chantraine. Geofractured, it’s what I was explaining, it’s when the chalk is split by the frost.

In Aÿ the chalk is compact and perhaps that’s why it doesn’t expressed itself like Les Carelles.

Mareuil sur Aÿ, Sous le Mont. This is the Mont du Crugès, on the southern slopes you have the Clos des Goisses. This hillside has resisted erosion because it’s not chalk in the chemical form of calcium carbonate. It’s a chalk that contains lots of magnesium… double calcium carbonate and magnesium.

The presence of magnesium gives increased resistance to erosion and also produces the flavours that magnesium produces in sparkling water, which is a kind of bitterness which is different from bitterness in burnt flavours.

It’s the bitterness of Hépar water (a mineral water we have in France).

So it’s a Pinot Noir that is serene, and can be luminous. It’s not demonstrative or masculine, it is rather feminine.

For Pinot Noir there is also Ambonnay, Bout du Clos. These are south-facing low slopes.

This vineyard is where we have the most clay and this expression is found in tasting Bout du Clos.

This openness from the wine, but which suddenly on the palate becomes tighter and brings you downwards, down to the depths. It’s someone who may seem easy to approach, but you know that with that person things are going to get serious. They’ll take you somewhere deep.

I’d like to go back in time to put things into context. What I believe is important in a wine and art is the imagination that it generates. Painting is not about comparing one colour next to the other or one painting next to another.

It’s like lines of poetry. You can’t analyse them individually, it’s only when you read one line after another that your imagination is sparked.

For food and wine pairing, it’s important not to stop at the senses. You have to use your feelings. That’s perhaps why the explanations I gave about the villages aren’t really objective but rather subjective.

What I like about Jules Verne is the world of imagination that he created. A prediction about a universe that he could only imagine.

The question you asked, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, because I was fascinated by the Apollo mission to the moon and the first man who walked on the moon on 21 July 1969. 20,000 leagues under the sea is a fantasy world that still remains unknown and Jules Verne managed to create an unbelievable world.

I can’t imagine growing any other plant than vines. But I might be able to use the products of the vine in a different way. We know that vine leaves can be consumed in Syrian or Lebanese dishes. We know that its fruit can be eaten as grapes, its juice can be drunk as wine, and we can make tasty oil from grape pips by toasting the pips and making a very healthy oil and is tasty, similar to sesame oil, in the same regions such as Israel, Syria and Lebanon.

And something else that is important to me in the same part of the world, and that’s Alep soap, which was first created using fat from plants, so olive oil and bay leaves.

I’d like to do that using grapeseed oil and saponify it with the ashes not from saponaria which is rich in potash, but with ashes from vines, which are also rich in potash. That would produce a soap directly from the vine, and coming back to Alep, the additional fraction of oil you could add would be argan oil, because I have attachments to Morocco.

In terms of producing something I’d also like to do something for consumers in Paris that would play on people’s nostalgia, to be able to present retired chefs or winemakers for a limited period of time who, instead of going from too much work to no work at all would go from too much work to a little bit of work. They would keep social ties and people who don’t have enough time or those who want to access experience could do that. And that restaurant would be called Il était une fois (Once upon a time).

I’m sorry not to have learnt English at school.

With regards to climate change, in reality we could complain, but we shouldn’t, because over the course of a decade at the beginning of my career four or five vintages were produced.

Now I can make nine vintages in ten years.

Climate change is allowing us to produce much better juice. We need to learn how to adapt our work to climate change. Changes in the juice gives different characteristics to the wine, and has higher sugar content, and therefore higher alcohol content.

This could cause problems in the Champagne method, as there is more sugar coming into the process.

We need to get back to the start of the nineteenth century, a method of prise de mousse and second fermentation that comes from champagne grapes.

I came back to the estate to work with my father in 2012 after I finished studying oenology and viticulture.
When I came back to the estate my father said straight away, ‘You’ve done the studying, you’ve got the knowledge, but you’ll see that now you’re going to forget a lot of it, and you’re going to learn new things with me.’

At first the task seemed huge, but as time goes by I find that either I make progress or things are getting easier. So the terror is diminishing little by little.

Let’s just say that writing my own story alongside that of the Domaine Jacques Selosse, Guillaume S, my own story, has relieved some of the pressure, open my mind to other things, and perhaps to be less scared of presenting wines. I have already made a first name for myself. I’ve put my first name to some wines, which was important. And to talk more specifically about the estate, there are several possibilities that come to mind. Still wines for example.

A still white wine might be possible. A dream of mine would be to find a parcel of Pinot Noir in a great spot to make a red Côteaux Champenois. I have some ideas about longer maturation periods in barrel for some vintages. I’ve got some ideas that come to me as the years go by. The more I learn, the more I discover more possibilities, and the more detailed my work becomes.