NOT DRINKING POISON
NOT DRINKING POISON Podcast
Ep. 23: Mathieu Lapierre of Domaine Lapierre
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Ep. 23: Mathieu Lapierre of Domaine Lapierre

A dive into carbonic maceration with the Morgon vigneron, who has just produced a handsome new educational poster on the much-discussed winemaking method.
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Mathieu Lapierre in his kitchen with a draft of the new poster in January.

I was thinking of when I was really young, five to ten years old, at primary school, [of posters that were] just to explain to us the cycle of a tree, or a flower... I wanted to take that kind of academic way of presentation to explain carbonic maceration to people. - Mathieu Lapierre

Mathieu Lapierre is the co-manager, along with his sister Camille, of famed Morgon estate Domaine Marcel Lapierre, which he has overseen since the passing of his father in 2010. Initially a chef by training, Mathieu Lapierre joined the family estate in 2004 after viticultural studies in Beaune. Few who have met him in his two decades at the estate fail to remark the breadth of his interests, which also include the piano, archaeology, and Legos.

The occasion for our chat in early January was the completion of a pet project he first mentioned to me several years ago: an educational poster about the process of carbonic maceration. I may just be the target audience for this sort of thing, but I suspect Lapierre’s finished poster has an impressive potential to improve the global wine conversation, which remains rife with inaccuracies and mistaken impressions where it concerns carbonic maceration.

It is a situation that persists simply because questions about carbonic maceration most often arise in wine shops, wine bars, and restaurants, where informed staff are often too hurried to effectively explain the process. In such a way, Lapierre’s new poster is an inspired marriage between message and medium: it offers, in the form of a handsome poster illustrated with watercolors by French cartoonist GAB, information that is helpful on the wall of a wine establishment. Check out the podcast for a history of carbonic maceration; the sociopolitical values embedded in its practice; and the link between carbonic maceration and aged meat.

Aaron

This is a free episode of the NOT DRINKING POISON podcast. For access to all the episodes - plus years of vigneron interviews, profiles, news reports, and commentary - please subscribe!


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Discussion about this podcast

NOT DRINKING POISON
NOT DRINKING POISON Podcast
Natural wine culture, by Aaron Ayscough. Reporting from Paris since 2010. Roughly a third of this podcast is available for free. For access to the other episodes - and to heaps of wine interviews, profiles, translations, commentary, and more - subscribe to