François et Julien Pinon: Today and Tomorrow
The life of a viticulteur was not one that immediately appealed to François Pinon, and as a young man he left home to train as a psychoanalyst. I have the feeling that, like many teenagers, he was keen to move out and move away, and at the time he had absolutely no intention of returning home to work with his father. Indeed, he was carving out a successful career in psychoanalysis when the call to return home came to him; Claude had announced his intention to retire, and somebody was needed to take the domaine in hand. That somebody was to be François.
François told me he never really worked with his father; they had just a year together before Claude threw in the towel, and so from the 1987 vintage, when he was just 35 years old, he found himself in sole charge. Perhaps this arrangement was preferable to François, who seems to have wanted to make the domaine his own, and to not necessarily do things exactly the way his father had. One of his first actions was to drop the old name of Domaine des Douveliers, choosing to market his wines under his own name instead. Within a year or two, like Catherine Champalou and Bernard Fouquet, François was making the most of the 1989 and 1990 (pictured) vintages, two great back-to-back years in Vouvray. Following this inception, François Pinon built upon these early successes, and spent more than three decades forging a strong reputation for this domaine.
Please log in to continue reading: