Julien Courtois

Butterfly label on Courtois's "Originel"

I will say something rather superficial about this wine: I love its deliriously psychedelic label. Ok, I’m glad I got that out of the way: what about the wine itself?

Julien Courtois is a vigneron who lives and works in the Touraine region of France’s Loire valley. He grows both red and white wines on soil that’s flecked with quartz (silex), and uses no synthetics in his vineyards and chai, bottling with the barest minimum of sulfur (for export only—no sulfur is used for bottles sold in France).

Courtois does not use synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, but does use biodynamic herb and mineral preparations on his vines, and fertilizes his vineyard soils with composted farm animal manure. Very much a poster boy for vin naturel.  

Sliex (flint) soil

Courtois’s “Originel” is a blend of two old and unique Loire varieties, menu pineau (aka arbois, but completely unrelated to the geographical Arbois of the east of France) and romorantin. Menu pineau is old variety that only exists today because of the efforts of a few stubborn vignerons who refuse to give up on it. Although it’s traditional to the region it was not replanted following the destruction of European vineyards by the phylloxera louse at the end of the 19^th century.

I’ve poured another wine made from menu pineau, Thierry Puzelat’s Brin de Chèvre, a wine that was a minor revelation for me: nutty, slightly oxidized, complex and also texturally relaxed. Courtois’s wine adds another menu pineau data point for me—I cannot comment about this wine’s typicité, but I really dig it. Tight as a fist when first opened, it reminds me of a dry, dry, dry sagardo cider from Spain’s Basque region.