Welcome To Clos Kixhaya
Clos Kixhaya - Beatriz Papamija and Etienne Le Blanc
France, Loire, Chinon
Beatriz, born in Colombia and Étienne, born near Calais; met whilst living in Spain, and have taken quite the long-route round to their new home and life as winemakers in Chinon. With the release of their first vintage imminent, we caught up with the pair at the end of January to learn how they made it to the Loire. Before we properly begin our conversation, Beatriz jokes she isn't the master of brevity. "Okay, I'll give you the long version!"
"We knew we wanted to settle down to have a family, and eventually work closely with nature, but we took a while getting there. We lived in Paris and London to finish Étienne's studies in Economics, and had our first child. Then we moved to Birmingham for Étienne's work - we loved it there! It was nice to be able to have an actual house instead of a little flat. And much closer to the countryside."
"But I had a masters in Architecture I wanted to finish at UCL and eventually we moved back to London for a little while. Then we had to re-locate back to my home in Colombia to help my parents, and our second baby arrived. All the while we were still formulating this little plan, how do we get to work with nature?"
"Over the years we were drawn to wine and natural wine in particular. Our understanding was that here was a practice that would enable us to be heavily involved with every step, from conception to completion. We wanted to be fully immersed, and winemaking is such a holistic practice - when done properly!"
That left the problem of where, and when. Leaving Colombia to return to Europe, the pair settled back in London to try and establish where they would make wine. With Étienne's family in Calais, the closest region to home technically was Champagne, but they weren't interested in setting up there.
Étienne's brother in Montpellier was the cheering squad for the perks of making wine in the south-west, but for Beatriz "It felt like an alien landscape! It was not home."
"It was starting to feel like now or never, so we just took the plunge in 2016 and moved to the Loire. We'd always loved the Loire, and the wines. We agreed that Étienne would keep working full time, whilst I studied viticulture and winemaking at the Edgar Pisani agricultural school near Saumur. Which is where I met Melanie Hunin, my oenology teacher."
"Melanie and Aymeric (at Melaric) have been such a support through this whole process. I did a little work with them and with another château in Saumur Champigny, whilst we continued our search for vineyards of our own."
Wanting to keep their process as full-circle as possible, the pair had specific criteria, hoping to find the traditional set up of a home, cellar and vineyard all alongside one another. "Our friends all told us we were crazy, that it would never happen. Well, it did take three years - but we found them eventually!"
After very nearly giving up the search, in late 2019 Étienne found - on Gumtree of all places - 4 hectares of old vines in Chinon, with a house and cellar right beside them. Jackpot!
Planted exclusively with Cabernet Franc on sandy gravel soils over limestone beside the Vienne river, the vines are between 30-90 years old.
"We got very lucky. The house was like a haunted house - the owner hadn't live there for years, she'd been in a home. But the vineyards were in perfect condition, they'd been leased out for thirty years to various growers, and everyone had taken such good care of them. Of every vineyard we saw, these were the best cared for.
"We had quite a bit of work to do in the house- but in the vineyard, very little! We jumped on them, and moved in just after the 2019 vintage."
Beatriz and Étienne are now in their third year of organic conversion, but are working above and beyond the minimum requirements for organic, or even biodynamic certification. Biodiversity is the priority here, promoting life as much as possible, and disturbing as little as necessary.
"We sew cover crops, plants we can use for herbal teas to treat the vines; comfrey and nettle, valerian for stress (ours and the vines!). We're bringing animals into the vineyards too, planting trees- a lot of long-term work into promoting life and reducing any monoculture."
The pair recently helped start a local co-op for biodynamically-minded vignerons in Chinon and Touraine. The eight growers that make up the 'Bouses Tourangelles' share the labour (and manure) in preparing the biodynamic preparations for their vines.
As for the future, four hectares is all they need as far as they're concerned.
"We're not interested in getting any bigger. At this size, we can do almost everything ourselves, except harvest of course, but for this we just need friends and family."
"Besides, everything here is designed for the production these four hectares yield. We have what our winemaker friends like to call a 'joke tractor'. It's tiny! Our press is little, our cellar is little, our forklift is little- everything is scaled back to keep us within these parameters. This year we're planting a veggie garden too- honestly I'd much rather have a bigger veggie patch than a bigger vineyard."
In 2020 - their first vintage- Beatriz and Étienne produced 6 cuvees. With the vines all within a very similar exposition and location, Beatriz admits her approach before harvest is still very much a "finger in the air feeling" as to which grapes will go to each cuvee, trusting her intuition and taste, instead of analysis. And it's working.
The soil does change a little though, as you head towards the river and drop down a little metre-steep slope. Here half the vines sit on soil that is much richer in organic matter, on a deeper limestone bedrock.
"With the vines not needing particularly fertile soils, this little change does have quite a big impact on the fruit. They tend to be much fuller grapes and we can feel more acidity - so I have to take this into consideration! But I still prefer to just taste them in the vineyards and make a call on the spot- I get to find out in very slow motion if my decisions were good ones!"
In the cellar, work is gentle and as lo-fi as they can keep it. Movements are undertaken by gravity, they like to keep extractions low but are not afraid to experiment with long macerations. Wines are aged in a handful of small, old barrels or in stainless steel and in 2022 they'll welcome a couple of bespoke raw-concrete tanks to the cellar.
Étienne draws comparisons with their work in the cellar to slow-cooking "We let the fermentations go at their own pace, we don't like to do too much extraction. It's very cold in here, and things tick along slowly. It's all a question of patience and trust in the work. It all happens slowly but surely. Maybe surely is not the right word!"
When pressed on if they've run into any unwelcome volatility with slow, even inert fermentations, the pair are resolute: "It looks like the wines have all the nutrients they need to complete fermentation, but they can fall asleep. If a fermentation stalls, we leave it. Leave it sealed, don't touch it at all. When spring comes, they always begin again and finish clean. These wines just want to be left alone to do their own thing."
"We hear our friends saying: 'wow its crazy this year, the wine is moving at 10 points a day!' or: 'woah, the fermentation finished in a week!' Meanwhile we're sitting here thinking oh my god... we have lazy wines!"
The results so far seem to be proof that their trust in the wine is not misplaced. The first three cuvees are available now and detailed below. Three more will be available once Beatriz gives them the thumbs-up.
"In addition to the first wines we're sending you, we have three more wines to release. Two reds: a long delicate maceration of our oldest vines and another aged in amphora; then our Blanc De Noir- which you don't see often from Cab Franc! I"m really pleased with it.
"But I'm letting these rest. Things can change so much when they are bottled, any big movement after a rest can be disruptive. We are zero-sulphur, and the magic ingredient when working with no additions, is time!"
The wines of 2021 are also now resting, and unlike many growers in the Loire, they managed to survive the brutal frost last April and are looking forward to 2022, with Étienne now helping Béa in the vineyard full time.
"It's early days still, we won't begin pruning until March. We decided early on, that's all we will do to battle frost: prune as late as possible so the buds start late. And spray a little valerian tea for the stress. The vines and ours!"
"We were very lucky with the frost in 2021. We decided not to burn outside - it seems crazy. We are so environmentally minded, the house is carefully insulated, we try to use wood for our heat source, and we are very careful all year in the vines, it just didn't make sense for us to be out there burning fires!"
With their first vintage in 2020 a huge success, we're honoured to be joining Beatriz and Étienne at the start of their journey. Principled and hugely enthusiastic in their approach, they are testament to the diversity of options available with just 4 hectares of Cab Franc in Chinon, if your passion can match theirs.
Now Available
RED 2020 - Les Grappes - Cab Franc
"We wanted to celebrate super-fresh Cab Franc, and knew we wanted to do it whole bunch. Lots of the other growers in Chinon were insistent that it's not really the done thing- the stems can be too green for whole-bunch."
"But the climate has changed in Chinon, and we were careful not to extract too much of that green profile. Its just a very delicate maceration in tank over 10 days. We keep the cap wet with a little bucket of juice, do no pigeage, and drain that free-run juice every couple of days. It was pressed slowly over 24 hours, and aged for 7 months in tank."
"It worked great! We thought it would be super young, very glou-glou- but its actually got a nice bit of complexity, a little structure."
