Aveine met Boris Desbourdes, independent winemaker at Domaine de la Marinière, a family estate located in Panzoult, in the Chinon appellation.
Why did you choose to become a winemaker?
You could say that I fell into the pot when I was very young. Indeed, my father and grandfather were already winemakers. I came to it a little late, but I came to it and it’s an exciting profession.
What are your greatest difficulties as a winegrower?
What I find most challenging, especially in years like this year, is dealing with the weather every day. In fact, adapting every day to the weather is both the most complicated and the most interesting challenge.
What do you like best about your job?
Generally, being a winemaker is an exciting job. In fact, it’s different every day. Moreover, we are independent winemakers, so we manage everything from the vine to the bottle, so it’s really a complete and exciting job every day. We go from planting the vine to the pruning, the disbudding, the vinification, to ordering the dry materials, the creation of the labels and the marketing. For example, in the same day, we can also work on the tractor, give a tasting of our wines to a passing tourist, or receive an importer or a sommelier from a gastronomic restaurant who was in the area. So it’s really a full range of jobs and a passion.
What is for you the most important commitment as a winemaker?
The most important commitment is our relationship with nature, biodiversity. This part of the countryside where we were born, where we live every day, which allows us to compose our wines, our identity that we put in each of our bottles and that we pass on each time we sell one of our bottles.
What is your favorite wine?
My favorite wine is the wine that is shared. It’s the bottle that we won’t hesitate to open with friends to tell a story. So here it is, often the wines that I prefer are the bottles of my winemakers friends and tell the story of the winemaker who is behind the bottle. Where I know him from, how he works. That’s it, the bottle of wine that we share.
A food & wine pairing to suggest?
Here at the Domaine de la Marinière, we are in Touraine. Therefore the food and wine pairings will often remain quite classical. And I’m not a real cook… So the main pairings are going to be Touraine charcuterie and Sainte-Maure goat cheese. For example, a bottle of Chinon just out of the cellar, a jar of rillettes, some rillons and a mature Sainte-Maure goat cheese. Or fouées with rillettes, small bread doughs that are just heated in the oven at the beginning of the heating process, opened in two, a little bit of rillettes and there you go.
Find “Winemakers Speaking”, the interviews of those who make wine, on social networks and on the Aveine blog.
