Romuald Valot: Smashing the Idols

Radical permaculture and zero-zero vinification in the granite heights of Beaujeu.

In the remote, undervalued slopes of Beaujeu, Burgundian émigré Romuald Valot is smashing the idols of what we might call, with unavoidable irony, the Beaujolais natural wine establishment. Depending on who you ask, his radical, hands-off permaculture and zero-zero vinification are either visionary daring, or pure folly.

Quick facts:

• Romuald Valot established his domaine in Beaujeu in 2013, after a career managing vineyards in Burgundy.

• He produces wine from a total of 11ha (of which he owns 8ha), spread throughout the appellations of Beaujolais-Villages (Beaujeu), Beaujolais (Saint-Jean-d’Ardières), Chénas, Côte de Brouilly, Chiroubles, Régnié, and Brouilly.

• He practices organic-certified radical permaculture, eschewing plowing for almost all parcels, and even forswearing Bordeaux mixture since 2016.

• His vinifies without additives of any kind, including sulfite addition. Wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered, without degassing.

• In 2020, he began experimenting with three small buried amphorae, in addition to his steel, concrete, and fiberglass tanks.

• His work in both vineyard and cellar is controversial within the Beaujolais. His supporters include friends like Burgundy vigneron Marc Soyard and influential clients like Goguette, Bacchus et Arianne, and Le Vin Au Vert in Paris, and Mes Bourgognes in Beaune.

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WHY NOT?

Romuald Valot’s wine thief is about one-third full of opaque purple juice the texture of curdled milk. He’s holding it over my glass and nothing is coming out. The tip of the wine thief has become blocked, again, with a grape seed.

“I should have waited to do pigeage,” he murmurs, shaking the implement and plunging it again into the mouth of the 400L buried amphora at our feet. It’s noon in November, things are still fermenting. “I did pigeage earlier today and it’s all in suspension.”

What little I taste of these two amphorae is the texture of the bottom of a Jamba Juice. I’m not sure how profitable it is to taste from amphorae right after pigeage. We fare better with his third amphora, buried outside (pictured above) on a hill amid a small experimental parcel of unpruned vines. The third amphora contains the fruit from those vines, along with some from an adjacent parcel on the hill above Beaujeu where Valot lives with his wife Cosima. Some of the fruit is in a liquid state, and that fermenting must contains a glimmer of fruit.

Valot is upper-middle-aged, sturdily built, with longish, graying hair, a gourmand’s belly, and an easy grin that belies his radicalism. He underlines that he’s not an amphora expert. He’s never visited the Republic of Georgia. He came to the idea of using amphorae following a visit to Luberon vignerons Marc and Shirine Salerno of Cadavre Esquis, who produce wine from untreated vines in glass demijohns buried amid their vines.

“For a vessel to be buried is the best, because there’s less variation of temperature,” he says. “So I said, “Why not buried amphorae?”

That question - “Why not?” - summarizes Valot’s courageously experimental approach to piloting the Beaujolais estate he founded in 2013. He’s not from the Beaujolais. He has no allegiance to its existing farming or vinification dogmas. So indeed, why not?

THE BIOSOPHISTE

Valot’s family is from the Hautes Côtes de Nuit. His previous career was in vineyard management for Domaine Zibetti in Chambolle-Musigny, where the grapes are sold to Domaine Faiveley. The experience left him with a fierce disgust with chemical treatments - both in the cellar and the vineyard.

“I’m against treatments. When I worked at my boss’ place, I had rashes everywhere, my nails were deformed,” he recalls, “Even the sulfur and the copper, they say it comes from nature, but its chemical, all the same.”

Valot assembled his very unusual estate with the idea that he would refrain from standard Bordeaux mixture treatments. The expectation of very low yields goes some way to explaining the very ambitious vineyard surface area he amassed - 11ha in total, of which 8ha are owned outright. Valot produces Brouilly, Côte de Brouilly, Régnié, and Chénas, along with Beaujolais-Villages and Beaujolais Blanc. He also maintains a 1ha parcel of pinot noir in Ladoix, which he vinifies in the Beaujolais and releases without the appellation.

For reds, Valot practices what is in effect a jerry-rigged, short-to-medium, pure-carbonic maceration. He calls it “infusion.” For Valot that means harvesting whole-cluster in small case, placing the harvest gently into vats (mostly fibreglass), and then adding a pied de cuve to initiate fermentation. He then removes the pied de cuve once the tank has saturated with CO2. He uses a manual vertical press.

In my experience there’s not a big qualitative difference between Valot’s Beaujolais-Villages and his cru-level wines. When they’re good, they’re fascinating: rustic yet delicate, low extraction, tremblingly pure gamays. They’re proudly lo-fi and borderline off-key, yet often masterfully constructed, like certain songs by Texas band the Baptist Generals.

Valot’s labels bear the self-styled profession of, “Biosophiste,” rather than “vigneron.”

“In Latin bio is life, and sophi is wisdom,” he explains. “So, in reference to my way of working, I mean to say that I’m even more wise than traditional organics.”

Valot still maintains organic certification from Nature et Progrès, the original, slightly fusty paysan organic agriculture association, whose imprimatur is sort of the Ralph Nader bumper sticker of the natural wine label.

Valot’s vineyards tend to yield between 15-20HL/ha in recent years, partly due to hail losses, in addition to the vines’ necessary adjustment to a zero-treatment regimen. (The parcel of Brouilly, incidentally, is left wild, the grass kept in check by horses who graze there.) Valot says 35HL/ha would be ideal someday. It’s a goal that, for once, places him squarely within the mainstream of natural vignerons in the Beaujolais.

A juicy, textured Beaujolais blanc.

THE LANDSCAPE

Valot is the only natural vigneron in recent years to set up shop in the Beaujolais not thanks to or because of the region’s existing natural winemakers, but despite them.

“I’m not close to anyone in the Beaujolais,” he told me back in March 2018, on my first visit. “I don’t like their whole club of natural wine.”

I remember being somewhat taken aback. What’s not to like?

“I esteem that to make a natural wine, the grapes have to be natural,” Valot reiterates in November 2020. “So I’m against négoçiant work.”

His stance has softened towards certain of his Beaujolais neighbors. He appreciates the primeur of Guy Breton, and admires the work of Michel Guignier and Christian Ducroux. Some of his own neighbors in Beaujeu are softening towards him, too.

“The trees I planted in the vines are starting to grow. Now there are some hikers who start to find it pretty. So the hikers are more indulgent than before,” he says with grim humor.

Despite its status as the region’s historical capital, Beaujeu today is among the more backwater towns of the Beaujolais. It’s tucked into the armpit of the mountains of the Beaujolais vert, meaning it’s rarely a place one happens to pass through. For most of the decade Valot was the area’s sole natural winemaker, until Iris Mauclert and Vincent Lebegue of Domaine du Croix Charnay set up nearby. But for Valot, isolation was the attraction.

“When I came here, when I saw the landscape, I knew if I truly wanted to work without being polluted by others, it was only here that I could do it,” he says over a lunch of braised beef cheek in the kitchen above his winery. “In Burgundy I couldn’t. It was the only solution.”

Valot doesn’t have to worry much about runoff from other vineyards in Beaujeu. His are just about the highest, at 500-520m.

Romuald Valot’s cuvage in above Beaujeu.

TROLLING

The senior natural vignerons of the Beaujolais - those of the Lapierre circle who began in the 1980s - have a word for the younger, scrappier, more purist natural vignerons who began setting up in the region throughout the late 2000s and 2010s: “trolls.” It’s meant to imply something unclean about their working habits and their wines. The trolls take the sobriquet with affection, because trolls tend to look up to the Lapierre circle.

The senior natural vignerons of the Beaujolais don’t have a word for Valot, though. He’s a special case: an older, cantankerous troll, more radical than the younger trolls. Most regard Valot’s agriculture with horror, because they know that a traditional Beaujolais estate could never survive with such low yields. Experimenting with ideas like ceasing Bordeaux mixture treatments, non-plowing, and non-pruning must look, to some, like dangerous whimsy. Like what we Anglophones might call “trolling.”

I’ve visited Valot three times since 2018 and this is the first time I’ve written about him. I always left his driveway in Beaujeu with a lot to consider. Lately I find myself increasingly grateful for the existence of vignerons like Valot, whose closest kindred spirit might be Anjou mystic Patrick Desplats. No one likes the question of whether organic viticulture is fundamentally as broken as chemical agriculture. But it’s important someone is asking it.

Romuald Valot, July 2019.

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Romuald & Cosima Valot
Les Celliers
69430 BEAUJEU