Henri Bourgeois: Then
For many generations the Bourgeois family farmed the land around the village, but what father passed to son was nothing more than a smallholding, a few plots of land given over to mixed farming. Somewhere in among the fruit trees and the vegetable plots (and maybe some goats, too) were a few hectares of vines. Nevertheless the early part of the 20th century was a very testing time for France’s smallholders; this was a time that sorted the viticulteurs from the agriculteurs, as after the devastation of phylloxera tending vines became a much more involved and costly process. A smallholder could no longer propagate his own vines by provignage, as vines had to be grafted onto the louse-resistant rootstock. “My great grandfather was a master grafter”, says Arnaud Bourgeois, and with this we see that the Bourgeois family were by this time firmly orientated towards the vine.
It was with the arrival of the next generation, Etienne Henri Bourgeois (died 1985), that these changes gathered pace. It was Henri (as he was known) who took control during the mid-20th century (and for whom the domaine is of course named) who steered the family towards pure and active viticulture. His work were the first steps down the road that would ultimately lead to the creation of one of the largest domaines in the entire Loire Valley. Today, Arnaud Bourgeois cites the work of these first two generations as instrumental in his approach to making his top cuvées, in particular élevage in oak. “My great grandfather and grandfather did not fine the wines, nor did they filter them, nor did they do cold stabilisation. The tartrates would come out naturally in the barrel. The stability of the wines came solely from their élevage”.
