Global terroirism

Heard the one about the Englishman, the Frenchman, and a bunch of Australians? As David Levin tells Richard Cree, making fine Sauvignon Blanc in the Loire is no joke, thanks to the bureaucrats

Even the most committed francophobe, invited to answer the Monty Python-style question “what have the French ever done for us?”, is likely to point to wine. Despite globalisation of the grape, the best French wines still set the standards by which others are judged. Which is why David Levin’s recent activities in the Loire are so remarkable.
Levin is a successful hotelier, restaurateur and businessman. He owns the Capital Group, built around the 50-bedroom Capital Hotel he opened in 1971, long before the current trend for boutique hotels. The business now encompasses three hotels, a few cafés and restaurants across London as well as a thriving bakery—and a fledgling wine business. It is this last venture that has seen Levin spending so much time in France recently. Working with a young French winemaker he met in Australia, Levin intends to modernise wine making, if not across the whole of France, then certainly in his small corner of it.

When he meets me at Tours airport, Levin looks every inch the pipe-smoking, red-sock wearing, right-hand-drive Brit the French love to dismiss as les rosbifs. And over the course of the next 24-hours Levin unleashes his fair share of tirades against the French. The French government is “corrupt”, and “in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies” and the French are all “liars”. The alleged corruption is to do with a spurious attempt by some of the French government to make organic farming illegal, on the grounds that it represents a health risk. Other accusations relate to the system for granting or withholding the right to mark a wine as “appellation contrôlée”. Currently, to qualify as an appellation wine, the maker is not allowed to state which grapes a wine is made from. The downside of this law has been only too obvious in the Loire in recent years. The region’s key grape, Sauvignon Blanc, has become the tipple of choice for a generation of wine drinkers keen to declare themselves as ABC (Anything But Chardonnay). Driven by grape variety, many of these drinkers will avoid Touraine, Vouvray and Pouilly Fumé (all Sauvignons Blancs) to reach for the Cloudy Bay (the iconic New Zealand Sauvignon, partly responsible for the grape’s boom).

Levin, keen to match the success of the New World wines, has slapped Sauvignon Blanc on his label. As a result it lost its appellation status, a situation he dismisses as “bloody ridiculous”. 
Despite these outbursts, Levin’s relationship with the French is more complex than early impressions suggest. He first bought a patch of land in the Loire 20 years ago, because he “fell in love with the place”. He is clearly fond of the area and has a good relationship with many of the locals we encounter during our stay. “I guess it’s like any marriage,” he says at one point. “It’s a love-hate relationship.”
If there is a degree of contrariness in Levin’s attitude, it’s a theme that runs through the entire wine venture. For a start, Levin baulks at the suggestion that this is a hobby rather than a business. “If I wanted a hobby, I would be lying on a boat somewhere with some ladies,” he jokes. “This has cost me over £1m so far.” His wine company, inevitably called simply “Levin”, has a strapline of “tradition and innovation”. Levin himself prefers to describe it as “the best of both worlds”.

Levin’s maxim is personified by his winemaker Thierry Merlet. Born in South Brittany, Merlet was hooked on the business from early on—his parents had a small vineyard. He studied winemaking and vinicultre in Burgundy and Sauternes, graduating with a degree in the subject. So far, so classically French. Then, in a neat parallel to what is happening today at the Levin winery, Merlet went to the the US and Australia and picked up some of the techniques being developed in the New World. “When I arrived in Australia,” says Merlet, “I searched high and low for a château. I eventually found one in the form of a corrugated and stainless-steel tank farm filled with high-tech equipment. It was a real eye-opener, I always thought you needed a château to make wine.”
Over the next couple of years, Merlet learnt winemaking Aussie style. And he quickly realised that many of these techniques would be perfect for making wines in the Loire. Thanks to a chance meeting with Levin in Australia, he now heads up his own “corrugated and stainless-steel tank farm”, this time in France.

It certainly stands out from the surrounding farms. Levin has encouraged wild flowers to grow all over the place. The building and most of the kit inside was imported from Australia, along with a team of antipodeans to build it. As a result, the very French Merlet is known locally as “the Australian”.

But for all he and Levin are happy to embrace Aussie innovation, over lunch at the winery both are keen to stress that the mission is to create a classic Loire-style Sauvignon Blanc.

As Merlet explains over a glass of his finest, he uses biodynamic principles to ensure that the terroir (a unique combination of soil, climate and history) produces the best possible fruit, expressing the local flavours and tastes. But he then uses the modern techniques he discovered in Australia to ensure that the purity of the flavour is maintained right into the bottle. “The aim of all this equipment is to reduce the wine’s contact with the air to prevent oxidisation,” he tells me.

Merlet, a serious head on surprisingly young shoulders, talks with earnest passion about his use of biodynamic growing techniques. It’s basically “organic-plus” and encompasses a combination of ancient traditions (no chemical spraying; planting at certain phases of the moon; spraying crops with various “preparations” at times in line with the natural rhythm of the soil, often diluted with rainwater and “dynamised” in a special copper pot, and so on) and complex modern scientific soil analysis. To the outsider, there’s something mystical about it. Levin’s attitude is more prosaic. “I don’t have a clue why it works. I don’t really know why I do it, other than that Thierry tells me it makes the best wine and it certainly seems to work.”

Having consumed plenty of the (good) 2004 vintage and even more of the (even better) 2005 vintage, I can confirm it certainly is working. That Oddbins is about to start stocking the wine is an even better justification for Levin’s claims for his wine. Cloudy Bay, look out; the French (well, almost) are coming to get you.