Eric and Jacques Boissenot
(first pubished Decanter magazine, June 2010)

There’s a certain status that goes with being a consultant winemaker. You can expect to rack up serious air miles from never-ending international flights, employ a chauffeur who whisks you from appointment to appointment, and be treated to a not inconsiderable amount of fawning as you dispense your wisdom on the best way to turn grapes and soil into a multi-million dollar wine business. So you’d imagine that being consultant to four of the five First Growths of Bordeaux (where a single bottle routinely sets their clients back thousands of pounds) would be the kind of job that comes with diamond-encrusted shoes.

If that’s true, you’d never know it when you reach the offices of Jacques and Eric Boissenot, set on a high street in an unprepossessing town of the northern Medoc (‘there’s off the beaten track in the Medoc, and then there’s Lamarque’ one local resident tells me proudly as I am asking the way). The Boissenot offices are on Rue Principale – rather ambitiously named, seeing as how it is pretty much the only rue in town – and when I arrive, I am taken on a torturous route through several gardens only to enter directly into the back door of the laboratory, much to the surprise of the staff.

Jacques Boissenot is only 62, but like the furniture in his discreet office to the side of the laboratory, it looks like the concept of upkeep hasn’t really occurred to him. He has the comfortable, lived-in look of an old professor, is discreet to the point of compulsion, and it seems entirely unsurprising that very few people outside of Bordeaux (in fact, very few people outside of the Medoc) have even heard of him. But he has been quietly turning out some of the world’s most sought after wines for over 40 years, and for the past 20 of them, his son Eric has worked alongside him. They seem to have a genuinely harmonious working relationship, asking each other for advice and respecting each other’s opinion, and the next generation has taken exactly the same professional approach – low key, discreet, anonymous.

You have to look to the list of their clients for the real story. To date, father and son Boissenot work with around 180 properties (90% on the Left Bank of Bordeaux) including Latour, Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Leoville-las-Cases, both Pichon Longueville and Pichon Comtesse, Leoville Barton, Gruaud Larose, Cos d’Estournel... if it got the nod in 1855, you can pretty much rest assured that the Boissenots are playing a part in it today.

So how have they managed to remain so under-the-radar? ‘Both father and son are very humble, shy and discreet,’ says David Launay, director of Chateau Gruaud Larose in Saint Julien. ‘We chose them for the type of wine that they encourage, and because they believe very strongly in staying true to the Medoc style; balance, elegance, fruit.’

‘The Boissenots would never describe their job as giving specific direction,’ says long-term client Luc Thienpont at Clos des Quatres Vents in Margaux. ‘Rather they offer suggestions.’

And perhaps it’s precisely because their clients are such high profile chateaux that they are able to remain in the background. ‘It’s easy to criticise certain wine consultants for imprinting wine with their own style, but this is often at the insistence of the owners,’ says Didier Marcellis, owner of Chateau Serilhan in Saint Estephe (consultant Hubert de Bouard). ‘As you move higher up the scale of chateaux, it is essential to have the property as the star, and admitting they need external advice could be counter-productive. The result is that most of the top chateaux look for eminence gris such as the Boissenots, while medium-sized domains will go for the visible, media-savvy consultants.’

This makes sense, as clearly one of the biggest strengths of any consultant is to work out not only what the wine needs, but also the owner. Jacques Boissenot would be the first to agree: ‘For many wines, there is the terroir, but there is also the philosophy behind it. You need to understand that, to be good at psychology. With the best wines, you don’t have enormous freedom, as you only want to improve them along their own specific lines, to respect what they are.’

Eric agrees, ’First you have to see what makes a wine tick, and that may take three or four years. Only then can you begin to refine that character.’ A good example of this would be the two Pichons. ‘Pichon-Longueville is all about Cabernet Sauvignon; powerful and long-living. Pichon-Comtesse has that aspect also of course, but there elegance comes to the fore.’

Jacques wasn’t a born oenologist. He’s not even from the Medoc, although these days he rarely leaves it. Born in Beirut when his father was serving in the military, the family returned to France when he was seven. The idea of wine was far away – his parents drank jug wine, at best, and he’d never tried wine out of a bottle with a cork until his late teens. His first choice of career was vet, but when that didn’t work out he changed to oenology because a friend suggested that there were easy jobs in it.

Once he made the switch, however, it quickly became evident that he had found his talent. His professor and mentor at the Faculty of Oenology was the legendary (and also famously discreet) Emile Peynaud, and he clearly spotted a young talent, because after Boissenot’s studies, he was asked by Peynaud to help create one of five new oenology departments around the Gironde. These laboratories, now commonplace in every wine-growing town, were the first of their kind (previously, pharmacists would do ad hoc testing on wines), and were sensibly located near to the vines in Entre deux Mers, the Graves, the Right Bank and two in the Medoc. Boissenot headed up the Pauillac branch, and clearly decided he liked the view.

For his son Eric, there was no need to spread his wings too far away from home. ‘It was not really a conscious decision to keep our clients here. I was born here, I live here, my clients are here – it just makes sense. I love the Cabernet Sauvignon in the Medoc, and the freshness that it brings out in the wine, it is just magic – similar to the effect of Syrah in St Joseph.’

Once Peynaud retired, Boissenot collected a few of his clients. He began working with Lafite back in 1976, then Margaux from 1987, followed by Latour in 2000, and finally Mouton, who asked him to join them in 2005. The only one keeping him from a full house is Haut Brion (it is left to Eric to answer my inevitable question of whether they would like to work with the last elusive First Growth: ‘We would never ask for anything, it is not in our nature. But we would be happy to be asked.’)

Today, Jacques is still present at the blending sessions, but Eric will do the majority of the day to day work throughout the year. He also travels, although they don’t really believe in having overseas clients. Even the Right Bank is seen as being an entirely different world, and poses a problem because of their belief in regular, detailed visits. But that’s not to say they don’t ever get tempted. ‘When I leave the Medoc,’ says Eric simply, ‘it is to learn things.’ Besides a few key clients on the Right Bank (including the Pomerol estate, Chateu Nenin, owned by the Delon family of Leoville Las Cases), Eric has recently ventured into Spain, and also Greece, where he has begun working with Alpha Estates. But by and large it is Cabernet Sauvignon on the gravelly soils of the Medoc that gets them excited.

It was, however, one of his Right Bank clients, Stephen Bolger at Crushpad, who gave one of the most revealing insights into his professional style. ‘If you are to engage with Eric on a purely business level, he’s a man of few words who makes each one count.  He’s also what you need in a consultant... someone who’s not going to let the client get away with some ‘dreamy’ interpretation of what they have or see before them. It’s made my vineyard review and selection process extremely efficient.’

Inevitably perhaps, they are suspicious of too much technology (‘Increasingly people macerate the skin for so long that the wine is full of tannins, and they then micro-oxygenate to smooth out the tannins. The obvious question for me is why extract them so strongly in the first place?’), or in new techniques (‘I don’t believe in putting grapes whole into tanks – they need a gentle crush to get the winemaking process going’), but it would be wrong to dismiss them as entirely traditional. They have been slowly turning all their clients, for example, over to the technique of co-innoculation, where the malolactic fermentation takes place at the same time as the alcoholic. For this, you need selected yeasts and selected bacteria, something that is controversial for winemakers wanting to use naturally-occuring yeasts on the skins of the grapes..

‘We began experiments in 2003,’ says Eric. ‘At first I was really against it, but now believe it guards against Brettanomyces (a bacteria that can spoil a wine), and I feel that it gives a winemaker more control and precision. You can also gain over a month in time, which saves in energy costs, and allows you to get the wines into barrel more quickly.’ As the Boissenots believe in blending at the start of the ageing process, co-innoculation gives the grapes longer to ‘bed down’ together.

‘It’s not a complicated process to make a good wine,’ says Eric. ‘You just need common sense. I like wines without excess, with a good balance and good complexity. All things that you can attain fairly easily without technology. And you don’t want to mask the identity of the place where the wine is made, that is primordial. Over-ripe grapes can hide the terroir. Your senses must be relied upon, your observation of when the grapes are ripe, but when too much ripeness will push them over the edge. It’s easy to go to extremes, but that doesn’t interest me.’

Jacques takes up this point passionately, particularly pertinent in the context of the Bordeaux 2009 vintage. ‘We have come so far with oenology and viticulture. But healthy grapes bring their own problems. The temptation to push them too hard is sometimes too great to resist. It’s human to exaggerate, and many people want to exaggerate ripeness, extraction, tannins... but that is not something we seek. Rather we hope that the wine will speak for itself, without needing to shout.’

And will they at least admit that they have been instrumental in creating some of Bordeaux’s most memorable bottles? ‘We have always considered that a good wine is the work of a team, and to put one or two people in the spotlight is not really fair.’

BOISSENOTS: KEY BORDEAUX CLIENTS

190 in the Medoc, 10 on the Right Bank

Left Bank: Latour, Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Ducru-Beaucaillou, Léoville-las-Cases, both Pichon-Baron and Pichon-Lalande, Léoville Barton, Gruaud-Larose, Cos d’Estournel, Clos des Quatres Vents, Villa des Quatres Soeurs, Chateau Tayac-Plaisance, Brane-Cantenac, Palmer, Talbot, Rauzan Gassies, Lagrange, Chasse Spleen, d'Arsac, Fourcas Hosten, Grand Puy Lacoste, d'Issan

Right Bank: Château Nenin, Chateau Cantenac, Crushpad Bordeaux

Own estate: Château Les Vimières  (Haut Medoc)