Thomas Pico

S

Saina Nieminen

Saina Nieminen
Domaine Pattes Loup (Thomas Pico) Chablis "Vent d'Ange" 2010
12,5% abv. Wonderful elegance and purity with lovely ripe citrus and mineral aromas. Not so much a steely or rocky style but a fruit driven one - but certainly not a sweet/ripe/sugary style. Crunchy, citric, palate-cleansing, bracing and pure. Awesome and far more characterful than most I have experienced from the region. Alongside J-P Brun's white Beaujolais this is the wine that has made me interested in non-fizzy Chardonnay.

But Thomas Pico has a reputation for not only being an exciting young producer but of being extreme in his anti-science wine making, aging the wines partly in cement eggs for some biodynamic reason or other.

I like science. I think the sciences are tremendously exciting and far more awe-inspiring than any myths humans have created. But I can't help wondering why so many of the wines I most love are marketed with such anti-science bullshit as concrete eggs and biodynamics. Surely there has to be a better reason than such anti-science ideologies for why I love them? Correlation, after all, does not necessarily imply causation.

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Coincidentally, this wine has just been offered in Ontario for the first time. Looking forward to having a taste.

I don't know what his reasons are for aging wines in cement eggs, perhaps they are indeed scientific. Presumably he has a hypothesis to test. I don't think anyone has falsified cement eggs. There must be many questions about cement eggs for the interested winegrower.
 
originally posted by Otto Nieminen:
Thomas PicoDomaine Pattes Loup (Thomas Pico) Chablis "Vent d'Ange" 2010
12,5% abv. Wonderful elegance and purity with lovely ripe citrus and mineral aromas. Not so much a steely or rocky style but a fruit driven one - but certainly not a sweet/ripe/sugary style. Crunchy, citric, palate-cleansing, bracing and pure. Awesome and far more characterful than most I have experienced from the region. Alongside J-P Brun's white Beaujolais this is the wine that has made me interested in non-fizzy Chardonnay.

But Thomas Pico has a reputation for not only being an exciting young producer but of being extreme in his anti-science wine making, aging the wines partly in cement eggs for some biodynamic reason or other.

I like science. I think the sciences are tremendously exciting and far more awe-inspiring than any myths humans have created. But I can't help wondering why so many of the wines I most love are marketed with such anti-science bullshit as concrete eggs and biodynamics. Surely there has to be a better reason than such anti-science ideologies for why I love them? Correlation, after all, does not necessarily imply causation.

6837114851_b59bd43921.jpg
Click to expand...

I like science too. Many poets and even more literary critics are also anti-science in a frequently thoughtless way. And yet they write good poems and produce interesting literary criticism. At least in the case of wine, and possibly (though probably unlikely) in the case of lit. crit. and poetry, science may come to explain the true cause of the success. Such is the difference between the context of discovery and the context of justification. Winemakers, poets and literary critics frequently only have to care about the first of these.
 
Fantastic note, Otto, and thanks for putting this producer on my radar screen. As to your central premise, that concrete eggs are anti-science, I am not at all sure. When I visited Wind Gap winery in Sonoma, they showed me their concrete egg fermenters. When I inquired as to the reasoning behind them, I was told (by their marketing director, please note) that studies have shown that the shape helps the wine circulate inside the fermenter. Concrete, of course, has its own special benefits, as Steve Edmunds has elaborated on in the past. It's basically neutral oak with greater permanence.

Mark Lipton
 
Dominique Belluard, who I work with, tells me the same thing, that the wine in eggs tends to get more movement during fermentation and hence a little more texture. Having tried his wine fermented in both stainless and egg I can tell you that the wines are markedly different.
 
Interesting to hear that the egg shape supposedly has such positive influences. Any double-blind tests done? Actual papers referenced?

The reason I heard (heard, not read, so sadly can't supply references) for eggs was that its shape is "the most natural, the most pregnant, the most mumbojumbo and most ooohh aaaaah shape for making cosmic wine." Or words to that effect. So I dismissed shape. Concrete I do appreciate.
 
Concrete, yes indeed. Or other masonry materials. The Georgian qvevri is approximately egg-shaped, buried in the ground with the narrow end pointing down. There, belief is entrenched for millenia, (call it science, well-established) that the shape and orientation are essential. (The clay material of the qvevri and the interment, equally so.)

Regardless of orientation, the egg shape would seem to minimize the 'backwater' area where asynchronous activity can occur. (Which is to say, bacterial infection.)
 
While I don't doubt the existence of copious oeno-ovum mumbo jumbo, the idea that the heat and mass transfer properties of an ovoid vessel might be different from those of a cylindrical one, and that such properties might have a dramatic effect on the eventual resting state of a biphasic reaction mixture, seems eminently uncontroversial; at least, to me.
 
Most recently, Francois Cazin described to us last week how his large ovals gave different aging than his big upright cylinders, because the lees spread over a much larger surface in the former.
 
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