A Visit to Clos Rougeard, 2024
I stepped out from my front door to be greeted by a bright summer morning. It was mid-June, and although the sun had not long appeared above the distant hill tops, the mercury was already in the ascendant. The air hung still, lush green leaves suspended lifelessly in towering trees, glistening in the new dawn’s rays. In the distance, a faint haze began to obscure the horizon, which took on a gentle shimmer.
The day promised much, not least some warm weather worthy of a tasting jaunt. Clad in appropriately light summer clothing I swiftly packed a bag. A camera. A notebook. A pen. And, obviously, a spare pen. And another spare pen. I glanced at the umbrella stood next to the front door, but mentally rejected it; it would be dead weight on such a glorious day. Instead, I threw another pen into my rucksack.
You can never have too many spare pens.
Once I had everything assembled I set off, my destination being a 45-minute drive away; I was headed for Chacé, to meet up with Cyril Chirouze, at Clos Rougeard.
My last visit to Clos Rougeard was about 18 months before this one, when I met up once more with Jacques Toublanc, the caretaker-cum-manager-cum-winemaker, a brave soul who took on these responsibilities for the estate after its acquisition by the Bouygues family (best known – although I suppose it depends on which wine world you inhabit – as the proprietors of Château Montrose in St Estèphe) in 2017. But at the time his tenure was almost at an end; it had always been a temporary position, and he was due to hand over to the new permanent winemaker Cyril Chirouze, previously of Château des Jacques in Beaujolais. The transition was scheduled for the week after that visit.
I resolved to return to meet Cyril (bucket in hand, below), and of course to take a look at the new cellars after their completion. And after an aborted attempt around the time of the 2023 harvest, we eventually settled on a date in June 2024.
Which is why I was en route here, soaking up the summer sunshine as I cruised along.
I was about 500 metres away from Clos Rougeard when the first few raindrops spattered on the windscreen. And 250 metres away when I had to bring the car to a halt.
What had started as a pitter-patter of a summer shower soon into torrential rain which the windscreen wipers, even on maximum speed, were failing to clear. Unable to see anything before me, I pulled over for safety’s sake. After five minutes, once the rain had eased – down from the level of a biblical flood to a mere deluge – I continued on, reaching the gate in barely a minute or two.
It was firmly closed.
With an imposing metal gate and an intercom buzzer set in the wall on the left-hand side (so completely the wrong side for a British right-hand drive) the entrance to Clos Rougeard now looks more like the gateway to Cheval Blanc or Cos d’Estournel than a domaine in Saumur. I ventured out into the rain – the memory of that umbrella stood by the front door as fresh as the rain which rapidly soaked my shirt – to press the buzzer. I half-expected a disembodied voice to speak out, telling me I had the wrong address, wrong day or wrong time (I must learn to deal with this fatalistic pessimism), but there was silence.
Then, after a few seconds, the gate slid away, and now thoroughly soaked I ran around to the driver’s side to drive the final hundred metres.
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