On Patience, Part I (Le Temps Retrouvé “L’Harmonie” 2015)
During harvest last September, Michaël Georget posted a series of photos to his winery’s Instagram, each a close-up from the vineyard behind his home. While the first is centered on a small, ruddy bunch of grapes, at a glance the rest lack a clear subject. A slightly concave patch of dirt framed by a halo of dry grass. An old vine’s curl, three or four wrecked grapes smooshed against the woodgrain. A skeleton of stems with fruit left in scattered clumps. Without context, these images look like many of the pastoral snippets found in the somewhat niche world of Winemaker Instagram, but it was in fact a news bulletin. Translated from French, the caption reads: “Harvest ended with disappointment, the 2021 grenache gris cuvée will not be present following damage from the wild boars which looted 1.5 ha.[1]”
That grenache gris (or rather, that same vineyard’s fruit from several years back) was my first run-in with Le Temps Retrouvé, the domaine of Georget and Céline Desperques. The wine was precise and concentrated, with a mineral density that nods to the lengths those roots have reached in their ninety years. These are the same qualities found in the couple’s best cuvées, and the effect is one that always pulls me back to this part of the winemaking world: gentle aromatics, a firm grip, detailed texture—a perfect tension between delicacy and power.
But unfortunately, no grenache gris this year.
Georget and his family live at the edge of a dense oak forest, just north of the French-Catalan border. As we talked about lost fruit, Chris Camo, Georget’s CA importer, dropped a pin in Google Maps to illustrate, and I walked along the verdant Avenue du Vallespir before zooming out. The satellite view shows a drier, mottled landscape laced with roads and dotted with small towns and farmland until, abruptly, it gives way to rumples of mountainous deep green, the Pyrénées' last eastern stretch before the coast. Boars live among those trees, but a recent, chronic drought has drawn them out. The natural supply of acorns, a staple of their diet, has dropped along with the region’s water table, and the animals have turned to nearby farms in response.
In this part of France, wild boars are generally regarded as pests, eating their way through crops to the extent that many people—including plenty of winemakers—shoot to kill when they get the chance, and have protested in favor of their right to do so. The reasons are obvious and mostly economic: less fruit means less wine means less of a living in a position whose margins aren’t exactly flush to begin with[2]. At Le Temps Retrouvé, however, while their neighbors are shooting boars or erecting fences, all you’ll find are freshly-planted oak trees.
When Georget and Desperques found the property in 2009, the vines had been abandoned since the 1990s and needed rehabilitation. All of this was done according to Rudolph Steiner’s biodynamic principles, a farming system oriented toward a self-regulating polyculture that’s guided by the lunar calendar. Going beyond terms like “self-regulating polyculture” feels important though, because while accurate, they’re not specific and tend to open up this system to critiques that focus on buried cow horns under the winter moon. The particular methods of biodynamics are about meeting the environment’s questions with its own answers, treating the Land’s harmony like water seeking its own level: planting grasses, flowers, cereals and other cover crops to build healthy soil; using compost preparations to promote a diverse microbiome; using the moon’s cycle as a guide for everything from picking grapes to bottling wine, recognizing that every liquid body is affected like the tides. Which is why it makes all the sense in the world to me that the duo at Le Temps Retrouvé, avid adherents of Steiner’s system, would rather patiently plant more oaks to meet the problem of grape-hungry boars than play ecological Whac-A-Mole.
You’d have a hard time finding a bottle of Desperques and Georget’s grenache gris right now, more because of the steady ramp-up of natural wine’s consumption cycle than anything else. That said, the 2015 bottling of “L'Harmonie'' is, at least as of this writing, available, and though it’s materially very different, it, again, communicates what the couple does best. A composite of grenache noir, syrah and carignan, with the latter, like the domaine’s grenache gris, from exceptionally old vines, farmed exceptionally well. So of course the wine is good—and forgive me if that almost feels beside the point. The tannin is tightly-knit, seamless with a surprisingly light body; in barrel for over two years, then in bottle for another four, “L’Harmonie” has benefitted from some time.
While patience is, no question, an investment, it benefits the drinker who sits on these (and most) wines for a little while, much in the same way that it benefits the winemaker who patiently observes and meets the environment where it is. The work asked of growers by Steiner’s model pre-dates the urgency of climate change and its ripple-effects; maybe new oak trees will help quell the boars’ appetites for grapes, maybe it won’t. We’ll wait and see.
[1] “Ha.” stands for hectare, a unit of measurement for land equal to about 2.5 acres.
[2] This isn’t true 100% of the time, but chateau owners in Bordeaux are more often foreign investors than they are the growers, and a producer with the time to collaborate with a Danish furniture designer seems to be the exception that proves the rule.