St Nicolas de Bourgueil
Adrien Ory pushed his chair back, away from the ancient wooden desk at which he sat and leant back, locking the fingers of his hands together behind his head. He paused for a moment, before he let out a long, slow and exhausted sigh.
He could feel the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Or, if perhaps not the whole world, then certainly he felt the expectations of more than one hundred of his fellow vignerons bearing down on him.
Monsieur Ory, a vigneron with a handsome domaine in St Nicolas de Bourgueil, had been elected president of the Syndicat de Défense des Vins de Bourgueil et de St Nicolas de Bourgueil only a few months earlier. The newly created syndicat, which was located in the town hall in Bourgueil, where Adrien now sat, had only been made real in March 1937. Its purpose was to protect, promote and develop the region’s vineyards and wines, and as president his first task was to ensure Bourgueil’s application for appellation status was submitted to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine on time. After all, they had already been beaten by Quincy – “Quincy, of all places!”, exclaimed Adrien out loud – not to mention Saumur, and Adrien did not want to find himself lagging behind any more of his neighbours.
But while there was pressure to get this done, Adrien was troubled by niggling doubts which he could not seem to resolve. Indeed, they seemed to dog his thoughts more and more each day.
Looking at the communes which they planned to include in the new Bourgueil appellation, the area of vineyards squeezed into St Nicolas de Bourgueil, at the western end of the slope, dwarfed that found in a number of the other communes, especially the likes of Ingrandes-de-Touraine and St-Patrice, not to mention some grander names such as Benais. Indeed, in vineyard area alone, St Nicolas de Bourgueil would account for almost half the appellation. And yet its wines, from the finest vineyards such as Les Malgagnes (the location of the harvest in the image above), which Adrien had always thought to be superior to those of his neighbours, were to be subsumed into this new appellation under the name of Bourgueil. This was clearly wrong and, as one of the St Nicolas de Bourgueil‘s largest landowners, not to mention its mayor, Adrien felt it was his responsibility to put right this wrong.
He sat up straight once more, and leaning across the mahogany expanse he pushed the Bourgueil dossier to the far corner of the desk. Taking a clean piece of paper he began to scratch a few words.
This was the moment (admittedly dramatised – just in case any descendents of Adrien Ory are reading) in which the St Nicolas de Bourgueil appellation was born.
