Domaine de Fontsainte: why all roads lead to Boutenac

The tiny hamlet of Boutenac, with its square with a fountain, café, church and chateau, looks like most other tiny habitations in the Languedoc-Roussillon’s Corbières, one of France’s largest wine appellations. In the five minutes since my arrival, I had already driven around the hamlet twice; if you’re going to get lost anywhere, make certain that it’s in a sleepy little French hamlet without a single stoplight and try to time your disorientation to coincide with the noon-to-3 p.m. traditional French countryside lunch interval when there’s no one on the road to slow down your progress in not finding your destination.

Fighting off my male impulse to never admit being lost, I finally asked a woman who happened to emerge from her house just as I passed by in my car. She gave me directions to my destination in Boutenac, the Domaine de Fontsainte. I wondered if Kermit Lynch had the same problem finding his way around Boutenac when he first came here 30 years earlier. Lynch, as I described in my story “La Gramière’s wine blogging ‘Wine Girl’,” is one of the leading U.S. importers of wine from lesser-known French wine regions, such as the Corbières.

He was here to taste the wines of Yves Laboucarié, who had begun making wine in 1971. Lynch was just starting his wine importing career when he came by here in the late 1970s, and I’m not sure what brought him to this sleepy corner of the Corbières—virtually unknown at that time to wine lovers. Maybe it was the pioneering spirit of Laboucarié. While most of the Corbières was awash in the cheap wine that is sometimes called in France “un rouge qui tache” (cheap red wine that is better at producing a stain than for drinking), he was using techniques such as carbonic maceration, hand harvesting and barrel aging to improve the quality of his wine.

After finally having located the discretely marked entrance to the wine cellar and tasting area, I was greeted by Yves’s son, Bruno, who took over the family business in 1995. The younger Laboucarié has been busy replanting some of the parcels that make up the 56-ha domain, building an aging cellar big enough to house 800 barrels, and developing his own “signature” wine, Le Clos du Centurion, which celebrates the vineyard’s Roman roots.

The Domaine de Fontsainte sprawls out around the hilltop hamlet like a quilted bed cover that someone had shook open. Fontsainte is made up of many vineyard parcels, each with its own particular south-to-southwest orientation to the sun, slight variances in the 90-meter-high average altitude of the property, and different combinations of its sandy, clay limestone soil. Carignan, Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre are planted to maximize the vines’ exposure to the sun, the soil type and drainage, micro-climatic conditions and whatever other aspect of terroir that Yves and Bruno believe best expresses each grape variety.

Take Fontsainte’s most celebrated parcel of ground, La Demoiselle. What particularity of this plot of land is responsible for the eponymously named wine that is the domain’s best-known wine? The Laboucarié say that “great wines are made in the vineyard,” and no doubt the Roman officer who created the Fontsainte domain 2,000 years ago around a thermal spring that received its “saint’s fount” name from Boutenac’s 12^th-century patron saint, Saint Siméon, would agree.

Certainly Yves and Bruno Laboucarié know their way around a wine cellar, but it appears that the 105-year-old Carignan vines on La Demoiselle have managed to tap into the distinctive, aromatic garrigue scrubland that is found everywhere in this part of the Mediterranean basin. La Demoiselle wine is an excellent natural wine, with ruby and garnet highlights, and pleasingly harmonious aromas that include red fruit, vanilla, pepper and freshly-milled nutmeg. It has received its share of medals, including a Gold Medal in the Grand Concours des Vin de Macon in 2008. And it’s a wine for laying down, as it will continue to age and improve in the bottle for seven or more years.

A lighter shade of pale

The other wine that brought Kermit Lynch to Boutenac, and which he says is probably the best value Rosé in his extensive portfolio of distinctive Rosé wines, is the Domaine de Fontsainte’s Gris de Gris. It was also what had brought me here, as I was curious about the idea of a vin gris.

I immediately liked the Gris de Gris, whose name, according to Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine, comes from vin gris (not grey, but a light, pink-colored wine that is made exactly as a white wine, but with dark-skinned grapes that are not allowed to macerate). “Wine labeled gris de gris must be made from lightly-tinted grape varieties,” she explains, “described as gris such as Cinsaut or Grenache Gris.”

The varietal mix in the Domaine de Fontsainte Gris de Gris is 60% Grenache Gris and Grenache Noir, 15% syrah, 10% Mourvèdre, 10% Carignan and 5% Cinsault. The wine is fresh, loaded with fruit aromas that are balanced with a tart acidity. For the price (which I’ll speak about in a second), this is a fantastic rosé. It has all of the attributes that distinguish a good Rosé, including an appealing salmon color with amethyst highlights and a delightfully long mouth-feel.

But the most amazing thing about this wine is the price. In the U.S. it’s priced at around $14 a bottle. But if you can get yourself to Boutenac, a bottle will only cost you €5—both are amazing bargains in their respective markets.

A week or so following my visit there, I put a bottle of Gris de Gris in the refrigerator to chill while I prepared a barbecue to grill one of Southwestern France’s culinary specialties, magret de canard (duck breasts). When barbecuing magret, I press whole green pepper into the meaty side of the duck breasts, and then, after scoring the fatty side with a knife, I grill them for approximately five minutes on each side. Sliced thinly and served with some new potatoes that had been steamed in a crock-pot, the duck was the perfect match to a bottle of red Fronton wine that I had opened. The AOC Fronton appellation, which is north of Toulouse, is located between the Tarn and the Garonne rivers. A rare variety of grape, the Négrette, which was brought back from Cyprus by the Crusaders, is used to make these deep purple-colored reds. The wines are less tannic than they look, and, when the yields are low, the Négrette can release a highly aromatic perfume that’s a mix between violets and licorice. This 2004 Fronton Thibaut de Plaisance that we were drinking had the mature fruit aromas and nice, velvety-soft tannins that good Fronton reds are known for, plus the spicy complexity that is a characteristic in wines from Château de Plaisance.

Our guests for dinner—two French friends, Christine, who did her MBA with me in the U.S., and her husband François, were passing through on a visit from New York City, where they now live. They were only in Toulouse for several days, as they had a family wedding to attend the following week in Normandy. The meal was designed to allow them to enjoy French specialties that would be difficult or very expensive to find in New York.

Everything, particularly the cheeseboard that my wife had assembled after a visit to the local market, was thoroughly appreciated. Particularly by François, who, in addition to sampling all of the cheeses, also recorded them for digital posterity.

That Fronton was a good choice to pair with the magret, but the highlight of the meal, for me at least, was the dessert:  perfectly ripe, locally-grown cantaloupes with the Fontsainte Gris de Gris. The freshness and dryness of the rosé, with its superb acidity, brought out the melon’s sweet, luscious taste. The soft, vine-ripened melon–oozing with flavor and aromas that took me back to the summertime, roadside fruit and vegetable stands of my youth, with piles of watermelons, cantaloupes and honeydews and fruit, intermixed with the odor of dirt roads and the smell of hot tires and car engines—brought out even more of the wine’s taste. At one point I felt that I was chewing the wine, with its amazing mouthfeel and superb effervescent freshness, and drinking the melon, feeling its juices being released as I savored each delicious spoonful of the silky-textured fibers. It was if the two heightened the sensation and flavor of the other, pushing them to heights neither could have reached on its own.

The Fontsainte Gris de Gris would be equally good, I’m sure, with any number of toast and tapenade spreads, or with grilled fish or even spicy Moroccan or Oriental dishes, as this is a wine with character and complexity. What probably made the Gris de Gris even more memorable was the conviviality of sharing it with good friends who appreciated the food and wine on offer. Thinking that I had paid just €5 for that bottle of Gris de Gris, probably less than the four melons that we ate with it, made me realize that Kermit Lynch was right about this wine being a bargain.

A work of art

The new aging cellar that Bruno Laboucarié has had built at Domaine de Fontsainte is a marvelous structure in both design and material. Built into a hillside and facing north, the cellar has a half-dozen long, narrow windows high up under the roof eaves, so that the hot, mid-afternoon rays of the sun cannot enter the structure. There’s discrete, milk-glass-globed lighting that wouldn’t look out of place in a fine restaurant and bare rock visible through arched openings in the cellar walls, setting off beautifully the cellar’s oak barrels. The warm glow of the oak, set against the stone and concrete, reminded me of a stark, modernistic art gallery.

Wine arrives in the aging cellar through gravity-fed pipes that run underground from the pressing cellar located across the street and a good 5 meters above the roof of the aging cellar. The investment and planning that went into building this new cellar is impressive, and it shows the devotion that the Laboucarié have for their wine.

Yves Laboucarié, who had been away running some sort of errand, arrived towards the end of my visit. He’s rather stooped, from years of hard work, I suppose, but he probably never stood much more than five feet tall in his heyday. It’s obvious from his son’s words that his father’s many achievements during his long wine career make him ten feet tall to him. They are obviously pushing him to make his own mark. On more than one occasion, Bruno Laboucarié told me “Each generation needs to leave something for the next.”

On the domain’s website, he talks about seeing “the land through your ancestors’ eyes.” Applying the lessons learned from those who worked the land before is only part of the task, he says. “You mustn’t copy,” he adds, “…authentic inspiration only comes from an understanding of what affinities are possible given the particular terroir,  the grape varieties and the appropriate cellar practices.”

That personal philosophy is certainly expressed in his signature Domaine de  Fontsainte wine, Le Clos du Centurion. The label has the image of a bronze coin, with the portrait of the first-century AD Roman Statesman and General Marcus Agrippa, that was found on the property. In creating Le Clos du Centurion, the younger Laboucarié first selected four micro-parcels, totaling four hectares. These were the best of the best of the domain’s terroir. Through extreme pruning and careful viticulture, the production yield in these parcels was reduced to a flavor-concentrating 35 hl/ha. The grapes are handpicked and then destemmed by hand. Following a slow and careful pressing, they are placed for 6 months in stainless steel tanks before the wine goes into oak barrels to mature for 12 months. Le Clos du Centurion is a blend of 60% Carignan (from 70-year-old vines), 30% Grenache Noir, and 10% Syrah.

It’s a dark, almost opaque purple in color, with cherry jam aromas, followed by different spices, primarily vanilla and cinnamon. Dense and complex, and blessed with silky tannins, Le Clos du Centurion is a wine that can be kept and aged for ten or more years. The 2006 that I tasted had a nice balance of fruit and the tannins were smooth and rich, and it has the peppery taste and tobacco flavor that is found in Carignan-dominate wines. He advised me that both Le Clos du Centurion and La Demoiselle would benefit from being decanted in a carafe before drinking.

Both are excellent wines, representing a generational transfer guaranteeing that Domaine de Fontsainte wines will continue to draw people to Boutenac for years to come.

Tagged as: Corbières, Languedoc