Didier Dagueneau

The Free Bacchus Story

Didier Dagueneau worked the steepest parcels of Pouilly-Fumé by hand and by horse, and kept his yields punishingly low. He held no organic certificate and the estate holds none now.

We looked for it in three registers and it is absent from all of them — the French national organic register, Demeter France and the international biodynamic register, each searched against a control so the nil is a real one. What nobody has put on the record is why. His importer describes a reluctance to take on the more dogmatic practices of organic and biodynamic farming, which is a statement about how the vines are worked rather than about paperwork, and classes the farming as sustainable, noting that copper sulphate is used and kept below the level the organic rules allow. Louis-Benjamin has said the family moved to organic methods in the 1990s, tried everything, kept what they liked and ignored the rest. That is a philosophy of farming. It is not a stated reason for declining a certificate, and we would rather say so than supply one.

He had raced motorcycle sidecars internationally from 1978, and came back to Saint-Andelain in 1982 to set up his own estate rather than join the family one. Eleven hectares, eleven pairs of hands: an extraordinary ratio for a white-wine estate, and the reason the parcels can be worked and picked separately rather than blended into one anonymous cuvee.

The wines are the argument for taking Sauvignon Blanc seriously as a great grape. Silex, Buisson Renard and Pur Sang are benchmarks for what the Loire achieves at its most rigorous; Wine Spectator gave the 2005 Pur Sang 97 points and the 2005 Silex 96. The flintiness and precision are inseparable from the farming — low yields, old vines, no shortcuts available.

Dagueneau died in a microlight accident in 2008. His children, Charlotte and Louis-Benjamin, have continued the estate with evident seriousness, which is the part of a producer's story that no certificate can cover and only time can demonstrate.