33-Year-Old Winemaker Thomas Pico Is The Future Of Natural Wine In Chablis
Pico sees winemaking as a community endeavor. His growers aren't anonymous; they are people he knows personally. He hosts exchange students from South Africa and people in their 20s and 30s who have had some difficulty in life and are trying their hand at winemaking to turn things around. His eyes shone as he told me about the festivities during la folie, the post-harvest party.
"My father was a négociant, and he wasn't organic," explained Pico — but he is determined to work closely with his growers, and organically farms a few plots of his family-owned land. Yet even though Pico doesn't filter his wines, he still wants them to be "clean" and in that sense, they are classically styled. As the Wine Advocate
reports, Pico's wines deserve a few years in the bottle before being drunk, but even in their youth they are bright, intensely mineral and show quality fruit.Pico is not alone in his quest to produce natural, organic wines in Chablis. Not far from Pattes Loup is the home of Alice and Olivier de Moor, whose wines can be found at places like Manhattan's Ten Bells and on lists all over France. Neither of the de Moors came from winemaking families, although Alice did grow up nearby legendary and cultish natural winemaker Jean-Francois Ganevat in the Jura. Olivier de Moor was a photographer before venturing into winemaking; the couple learned their trade at the oenological school in Dijon. The de Moors' wines are star-bright, and vibrant to the point where you hold your breath for a moment after taking a sip, feeling the energy in your glass.
It was, in fact, Olivier de Moor himself who made the call to Paris-based export agent Thomas Calder in 2009, urging him to visit Pico and taste his wines. Calder did so, and was impressed. But more than that, he understood that the young Pico would need a strong spokesperson.
"I visited Thomas Pico with a client from Maryland, and he wasn't convinced," Calder told me over the phone, "And I had to say: look, he's just starting out, and if you don't start with this domaine now, it will be too late."
Within two years, Pico was the darling of the natural wine world, and his table was so mobbed at industry tasting events that he elected to stop going to them at all. Calder recounted how when Pico took over farming 2.4 hectares of his father's land in 2005, determined to do so organically, his father thought he was crazy.
"There's less incentive to grow organically in Chablis than in the Loire, where it attracts people," Calder explained. Chablis wine is already so well-known and considered high-quality, so growers don't bother with the extra work presented by organic farming — tending the vines by hand, for example, as well as the risk presented by using less pesticides.
Even just looking at the labels on Pattes Loup and the De Moors' wines, compared to the traditional fonts covering other Chablis bottles, you can tell you're getting into something fresh, different and forward-looking. But what's exciting about Thomas Pico, the de Moors, and another Chablisien natural winemaker, Patrick Piuze, is that their wines are unmanipulated yet display the typicity of Chablis, its signature Kimmeridgean complexity due to centuries-old deposits of oyster shells, and, at higher elevations, limestone. These vintners aren't just making hipster wine to be drunk in Paris nightclubs; these wines are totally sincere and respectful of the region's history and terroir.
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