In Search of Le Graal
Frédéric Bourillon remembers the cellar first. He remembers being very young and struck by the vast scale of it, cathedral-like, an impression that has stayed with him throughout his life at Domaine Bourillon Dorléans. The estate’s caves, cut into the local tuffeau limestone, are still used today for ageing wine, and for Frédéric they represent something larger than simple storage. They were there before him and they will remain after him. Like some venerable stone monument from another age, they seem built to sit there forever.
Tuffeau is the soft limestone that runs through much of the Loire. It has been carved into houses, cellars and entire networks of caves, and naturally it is rather useful for keeping wine cool and settled underground. The Loire does not exactly struggle for beautiful wine cellars, but Bourillon Dorléans surely has one of its more memorable examples.
The Bourillon family has deep roots in Vouvray. The domaine took shape under Frédéric’s grandfather, Gaston Dorléans, who sold wine under the family name from the early twentieth century. Frédéric’s own relationship with wine began long before he was old enough to make it. He still remembers bottles from 1921, 1947 and 1959 made by his grandfather, wines that gave him an early sense of what Chenin Blanc could become with time.
Becoming a winegrower, he says, was inevitable.
“It was always what I wanted to do. I never considered another path.”
Quite convenient, really, when your family happens to have vines in Vouvray.
He did not stay entirely within the family fold. Frédéric studied viticulture in Avize, in Champagne, before returning to Vouvray and establishing his own operation in the 1980s. When his parents retired, the businesses were brought together, and the domaine continued to evolve around a very simple central idea: Chenin Blanc, interpreted through place, season and time.
For anyone whose relationship with Chenin starts and ends with a bottle labelled “Chenin Blanc”, Vouvray is a good place to realise how much more there is to it.
Here, one grape can become dry, off-dry, sweet or sparkling. A dry Vouvray might be taut, chalky and citrusy; another broader, waxier and more textural. Leave more natural sugar in the wine and you move into demi-sec, somewhere between dry and sweet. Push further and you arrive at moelleux, the richer, sweeter end of Vouvray.
After more than forty years working with Chenin, Frédéric still speaks with the fervour of an obsessive. He calls the pursuit Le Graal, the Holy Grail, a search for the perfect wine.
“I keep coming back to Chenin, year after year, always searching,” he says.
There is a quality the Japanese would call shokunin about him, the craftsman who returns to the same work again and again, chasing perfection through tiny adjustments and accumulated experience.
That gets to the essence of both Frédéric and Vouvray. Chenin is enormously responsive to the year around it. “Chenin, in all its diversity, is a true mirror of the year’s climate,” he says.
Vintage matters everywhere in wine, but in Vouvray it is a fickle mistress. The vineyards sit over that tuffeau limestone, with varying amounts of clay, silica and flint, while the Loire helps shape a growing season that is rarely identical from one year to the next. Warm years can bring more richness and ripeness; cooler seasons preserve more tension and acidity.
Acidity is one of those wine words that gets thrown around a lot, but it is basically the thing that makes your mouth water and gives a wine freshness. It is also one of Chenin’s great superpowers. Even when the grape becomes very ripe, or very sweet, good Chenin can retain enough acidity to keep everything lifted rather than heavy.
This becomes particularly important when you get into sweet Vouvray. In certain autumns, grapes can be left longer on the vine to concentrate. Some shrivel naturally, a process known as passerillage. Others may be affected by botrytis, or noble rot, a fungus with a terrible name and a very glamorous job: removing water from the grape and concentrating sugar, acidity and flavour.
In the right vineyard, at the right time, it can make extraordinary wine.
Frédéric is not particularly prone to clinical language. Asked what he looks for when walking the vineyards, he says he feels the “vibrations coming from the soil” and from there starts to imagine what the coming vintage might become.
His approach is less about imposing a fixed style on each year and more about responding to what arrives. As the climate has shifted over the course of his career, that need to adapt has only become more important.
The domaine’s wines cover a broad spectrum of Vouvray, but the dry expressions are particularly useful in understanding Frédéric’s approach.
L’Indigène, for example, is fermented with indigenous yeasts and aged in used French oak in the caves. Indigenous yeast simply means fermentation begins with the naturally occurring yeasts already present on the grapes and in the winery, rather than a selected commercial strain being added.
The use of older oak matters too. Barrel does not always mean big vanilla or woody flavours. An older barrel can give a wine texture and gentle oxygen exposure without making it taste like a piece of furniture.
L’Oppidum takes things further, coming from a small cliffside parcel and spending time in new French oak, with the intention of producing a wine built for ageing rather than immediate drinking. It is a more ambitious expression of dry Chenin, and one that makes sense when you consider the wines that first shaped Frédéric’s palate.
Those old bottles from his grandfather were proof of Chenin’s enormous potential. This is a grape capable of producing wines with the structure, complexity and longevity to sit comfortably among the great age-worthy wines of France, even if it has never enjoyed quite the same fame as Burgundy or Bordeaux.
One vintage in particular still stands out for Frédéric: 1989, when he made his first Tri de Nobles Grains. It was his first moelleux vintage and became an important milestone in his career, later receiving 96 points from Robert Parker.
Tri de Nobles Grains translates roughly as a selection of noble grapes. In practice, it means picking through the vineyard selectively, often over several passes, taking only the grapes that have reached the right degree of concentration. It is slow, expensive and slightly obsessive work.
Making great sweet Vouvray depends on balance. Sugar on its own is not particularly interesting. The magic is in having enough acidity underneath it to give the wine shape, freshness and longevity. Done properly, the result can age for decades, moving away from obvious fruit into flavours of honey, spice, quince, beeswax and all the strange, delicious things that old Chenin seems to collect along the way.
That capacity to age links directly back to Frédéric’s grandfather and those bottles spanning the first half of the twentieth century. The wines that first made him want to become a winegrower were already showing him what patience could do.
Frédéric now finds himself at the other end of the family story, with his sons Maxime and Benjamin involved in the domaine. He is proud to be passing the work on, but his view of succession is not especially nostalgic.
“I hope they carry the tradition forward.”
Fair enough. You expect that. Then comes the more interesting part.
He also wants them to experiment, particularly with how the domaine’s different parcels are brought together and how future cuvées might be assembled.
In wine, a parcel is simply an individual piece of vineyard, often with its own soil, aspect or character. A cuvée is the wine that eventually comes out the other end, whether from one parcel or several blended together. Frédéric would like to see the next generation find expressions that perhaps he would not have made himself.
That balance between continuity and change probably says more about Bourillon Dorléans than any grand statement about tradition ever could. The caves, Chenin and family remain, but the wines do not stand still.
Each generation has adjusted, each vintage requires a different response, and each new wine adds something to what came before it. For a domaine with so much history, there is remarkably little standing on ceremony.
After countless harvests, Frédéric says what still excites him is discovering grapes with a different character every year and imagining the wine they might become.
It takes us back to Le Graal.
The perfect Chenin is still out there somewhere, and he has spent a lifetime looking.
