IF ONLY WALLS COULD SPEAK - Blancpain

After preaching his non-intervention
beliefs for four years to a wide range
of small high quality domains, Mounir decided
to embark on his own venture. Through
his consulting, he met domain owners who
were single-mindedly dedicated to quality
and to crafting wines of distinction. He then
convinced these domains to sell him small
fractions of their production. Sometimes this
meant settling for but a single barrel—25
cases—of a particular wine. Upon delivery of
the wine in barrels, Mounir adheres to his
non-intervention credo. In addition to abjuring
fining, racking and filtering, he barrelages
the reds and whites on 100% of their
lees. Indeed, Mounir demands that his producers
supply the wine with a large quantity
of lees depending on the vintage. Lees are a
source of CO2 which helps the wine age and
in certain vintages like 2000 can bestow a
slightly creamy quality. For the whites, a
gentle stirring of the wine (called “batonnage”)
is done three or four times a month.
Mounir uses only the highest quality
Seguin Moreau barrels with oak from the
Jupilles forest. His attention to detail does
not stop there. He insists upon fine grain in
the oak and upon a slow toasting, varying in
degree depending upon which wine will be
aged in the barrel. Unusual today, when reuse
of barrels for two or three vintages is
common, 100% of his barrels are new.
When it comes time to bottle the wines,
Mounir does it the old-fashioned way, by
gravity. By contrast, one large negotiant in
Beaune, once pointed me with great pride
to his newly installed system of pumps,
meters and pipes with which he could automate
the bottling process. Great wines are
living things which evolve in the bottle. How
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can such a delicate living thing be pushed
through the vanes of a pump?
In a further nod toward tradition, Mounir
uses special heavy glass bottles with a very
deep (or seen from the other side, high) indentation
at the bottom (if you want to dazzle
your friends with your mastery of wine terminology,
the indentation is called a “punt”). Of
course it is entertaining and practical to pour
the wine with ones fingers firmly docked in
the indentation, but there is another more
substantive reason for bringing back this traditional
bottle shape. The deep trough that is
created becomes a good trap for sediment. As
experienced burgundy collectors know, far
from revealing a flaw in wine, the accumulation
of sediment as the wine ages is the sign
of a wine that is alive and evolving. The contrary
is also true, wines without sediment
generally get that way because the elements
Mounir Saouma and
Rotem Brakin