Sébastien Christophe, a golden story
Like a gold prospector looking for a vein,
Sébastien Christophe spent his childhood digging on the land of the family
farm. He found in the terroir the way
to turn wheat grains into golden shards. A Chablis that is now served Place
Vendôme, in the heart of the jewelry district in Paris.
He started with almost nothing, just 6,000 square meters of vineyards for his
first vintage in 1999. Sébastien Christophe launched himself like the punk rock fan he is, diving from the
stage. He jumped into the void without knowing where he was going to land.. His
parents were grain farmers. They couldn’t really help. Everything had to be
built from scratch. After he left school in Beaune, he could have toured the
new world like many of his colleagues. A famous Chablis winemaker offered him a
job in Chile. He did not have time. Hewas busy making his mark.
A good vein
Sébastien Christophe likes to quote the great
Winston Churchill. "What you call luck does not exist. It’s simply my
attention to details”. For his first vintage, he got two stars from the
prestigious guide Hachette. The following yearhe found the good vein. In twenty
years he went from "grains that did
not provide much wine that provided a lot". His estate soon spread over thirty hectares. The 2018 vintage was in such high demand that italmost
entirely sold out in advance even with
an abundant harvest.
Sébastien Christophe knows his land by heart. As a child he was often on all fours
in the fields of the century old farm, digging
in search of beautiful ammonites and Kimmeridgian plates. These small
fossilized oysters bring Chablis its
precious minerality. For wheat, however, it’s difficult to find a trace of the terroir
in the flour. "When you see the yields of wheat on these soils, you
realize that it is better to make wine", he laughs, as we walk along the Chemin de Compostelle which crosses his Petit Chablis vineyards.
Like Aladin
To make his wines, Sébastien Christophe behaves like
Aladin. He asks "the spirit of the terroir to come out of the
bottle," as if he had locked up for years the genius of minerality with a
cork. He pursues the purest expression of a terroir
he knows like the back of his hands. He has a steady rule: "always keep
the same way of winemaking to better preserve the memory of the wine". Each vintage thus naturally expresses its
differences.. "It's the exact opposite of modern oenology", he
recognizes. The 2014 vintage has filled this gold seeker with bursts of purity.
"It reminds me of the Chablis that we tasted in the early 1980s, with the terroir that stands out."
Sébastien Christophe wants his wines to keep
their identity like the rock group, Nirvanakept
their authenticity even when they played their music without amplifiers. Even if he raises 20% of his first growth in
oak barrels (Fourchaume, Mont de Milieu and Montée de Tonnerre), he wants to prerserve
the character of Chablis. "With
wood, you have to go sparingly." He speaks about "melting the woody
taste into the wine", as gold is melted into jewels.
The anxiety of Bourguignon winemaker
He looks cool, Sébastien Christophe, but his
calm hides a lot of anxiety. When he started, he feared what his wines would
taste like fifteen years later. It is an anxiety of a Bourguignon winemaker to
wonder if the genius of the terroir will still come out of the bottle years
later. "Succeeding in winemaking is a crazy thing," he says.
No surprise that his golden wine is one of the top choices of the Ritz hotel, Place
Vendôme. The head sommelier, Estelle Touzet, was looking for "young gems".
Gems ... Another golden story.
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