Olivier Decelle - Harvests the green
brandchannel.com - October 2, 2006
In winter, the French Maury region looks like it’s been scorched by a wildfire. In a valley below ruins of Cathar fortresses, dark vine stumps poke out of dense schist-laden soil. On a quiet day, it almost seems the fire might have been intentional and the winemakers headed north for the greener pastures of Corbières.
Strange to think that it’s here, on one of the region’s only green plots, that the stalled French wine industry is getting a much-needed kick-start from a former frozen-food mogul.
Maury, though its wines are name-controlled with the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) label, seemed forgotten as its neighbor to the north underwent a rebirth.
Outside of Maury, it was hard to find anyone who has a bottle of its AOC. If they did, it was probably in a dumpy, dust-covered bottle, forgotten in the back of a cupboard.
When business mogul Olivier Decelle left Paris in 1999, he bought and began work to rehabilitate the Mas Amiel winery, one of Maury’s many vineyards in decline. The crusty locals thought he was a nut.
“A lot of people said I’d be out of here in a couple years,” he says.
Now they copy him and pray they’ll enjoy his obscure wine’s cult status.
Decelle tackled the problem of how to revive the vineyard the old-fashioned way: by throwing money at it. Oddly enough, what keeps Mas Amiel from being a rich man’s folly is Decelle’s history in frozen foods—more precisely, as the CEO of Picard Surgelés, the French version of the frozen-food aisles at American retailer Trader Joe’s.
The end result is an astonishing variety of wines.
At a recent tasting in Paris, Georges Lepré, the onetime head sommelier at both the Grand Véfour and the Ritz Hotel in Paris, proclaimed, “These aren’t tastings, these are gifts!” Strong words for a guy who 15 minutes earlier called acidity necessary in wine because, “without it, the wine would be soft as a sock!” Decelle, wearing Diesel jeans in a room full of suits, leaned against a table and grinned quietly.
In his land of gruff locals, Decelle has also chosen to go biodynamic—often considered a sort of loopy cousin of organic wines—but looking at his neighbors’ black plots, you can’t blame him for trying something new.
“Maury should be green, but there are parts where it’s so over-fertilized and there’s so much junk, weeds don’t even grow,” he says. “After a while, only roots exposed to the air do much good.”
With the help of hired-gun wine prodigy Stéphane Gallet, they brought the green back into the scorched-looking valley.
Their success with their vines is easy to see and their willingness to experiment with their parcels is applause-worthy in a country where change tends to take decades.
“You can tell which vines are ours and which ones aren’t, pretty easily,” says Decelle, pointing out those with any green in them—all his—from behind the wheel of a 4x4.
A variety of tractors, like the tiny Swiss model fitted with tank treads so it can be used on mountainsides, break through the dense rocky soil, cutting the roots of the old vines and forcing them to burrow deeper into the soil. Grass is then planted over the top.
“[Bigger tractors] kill the soil!” he says, flapping his arms with only the slightest trace of what the French call cinema as he points out serious dents left in the earth in a test area where more traditional models were tried.
On other parcels, these strewn with thousands of stakes that will guide new vines toward the sun, he’s testing for the best vine density.
“A German journalist thought it was some sort of sculpture,” says Decelle, with a smirk acknowledging the parcels’ Christo-like qualities.
Elsewhere, they planted hemp, helping rid the land of a worm-borne virus and simultaneously aerating the soil. “The cops weren’t too keen on that one, but they went with it.”
Decelle seems to be constantly testing, constantly trying to figure out how to achieve harmony. In an earlier life, he would have been a crop-rotation pioneer.
His work with Picard gave him a double advantage as a winemaker: the knowledge that a biodynamic approach could succeed (he fought against growth hormones and colorants in his stores’ products, for example), and the financial cushion needed for the transition to a “greener” vineyard.
Production initially dropped, but even with Bordeaux competitors producing two to three times as much wine from similar amounts of land, Decelle takes more of a quality-over-quantity approach. “You can get a lot out of the new varieties that are out there, but they taste like crap. Everything tastes the same after a while.”
Judging from the lack of prestige wines from the Maury region in France (let alone the rest of the world) before Decelle arrived, gunning for high production numbers would be a long, slow road to ruin.
“When I got here, three of my top people didn’t even speak to each other,” he says. “You can’t make great wine in le combat. You’ve got to be able to have confidence in everyone.” Decelle wouldn’t name names, but nipped the problem in the bud by letting all three go.
His marketing savvy and knowledge of his home country also helped him get Mas Amiel’s name back into circulation, and he’s using this to capitalize on what makes their wines unique. Above and beyond sommelier Lepré‘s glowing description, Mas Amiel’s wines have been a recent big find among chocolate and cigar lovers.
In fact, my first introduction to Mas Amiel’s wine was at a fancy food show when one of Paris’ best dessert specialists sent over a bottle—along with a meltingly good chocolate gateau with a thin layer of pineapple—as a professional tip of the hat to a colleague.
Instead of the wild lack of balance that usually plagues chocolate and wine, some of Mas Amiel’s offerings turn the task into a synergy.
“It’s a coincidence that it’s like that with chocolate,” concedes Decelle, “We can only cultivate the marketing side of things.”
In the beginning, Decelle also forsook the French as a market, seeing them as too set in their ways to try breaking into that niche. “The French only ‘eat’ labels” is how he puts it. Instead, he courted younger French drinkers while selling his wines abroad; his first bottles were sold in the US. Without much effort, however, the French press began to take notice—and restaurants and wine sellers have followed suit.
The initial skepticism of his compatriots for Mas Amiel dribbled all the way down to the label printer. “When we first made the purple [yes, purple] label, they stopped the presses to make sure they had it right,” he explained. “When we said ‘Yes,’ they wanted the money up front.”
Now, however, his neighbors are making purple labels of their own.
Joe Ray is a food and travel writing specialist based in Europe. He can be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.
