Nicolas Joly and the Clos de la Coulée de Serrant: The Joly Era
It was in 1962 that the Château de la Roche aux Moines and its associated vineyards, including the Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, were acquired by a surgeon from Paris named André Joly. He and his wife Denise were looking for a country residence, and didn’t have a great interest in viticulture. As a start it isn’t that unusual a story – we might do well to remind ourselves that Victor Huet and his wife Anna-Constance were also looking for some country air, perhaps with a little woodland from which they could earn a living as forestiers, when they chanced upon Le Haut Lieu hidden above the town of Vouvray. So, more by accident than by design, André and Denise Joly found themselves the owners of a vineyard which today is regarded by many as one of the greatest in the entire Loire Valley, and indeed has been ranked as one of the greatest in all France. One of them would have to do something with it, and as it happened this would be Denise. She was friends with the Fournier family, at that time proprietors of Château Canon in St Emilion.
When recounting the history of any château or wine estate, periods of ownership are often expressed as eras, with one such era of family ownership often spanning several generations. Today this estate remains in the ownership of the Joly family, but there is certainly a new era, the beginning of which is marked by the handing over of control from Denise Joly to her son, Nicolas (pictured). One of two sons, Joly had carved out a successful career in the financial sector with the JP Morgan Guaranty Trust, having previously graduated with an MBA from Columbia University. It was in 1976 that he returned to the family estate to help his mother, by which time she had already been widowed. In order to take over the running of the estate he very sensibly first went back to school, studying oenology in Bordeaux for two years. Suitably educated he took up the reins, but it was not until the 1980s that things really took off. The catalyst for the changes that followed was a book on biodynamic agriculture, by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which Joly discovered in 1981. Nicolas Joly read the book on a skiing holiday and found it a life-changing experience; within four years he was running his estate on entirely biodynamic principles, a move which set him on a path to becoming the world’s leading exponent of biodynamic viticulture.
Please log in to continue reading: