Evelyne de Pontbriand, a former French teacher who had no formal experience in winemaking when she took over her family’s winery in the Loire Valley, but nevertheless made it a leading example of organic viniculture and herself an internationally renowned voice for sustainable farming, died on November 5th in Angers, north-west France, at the age of 73, reports The New York Times.
Her husband, Gaël de Pontbriand, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by cancer.
Mrs. de Pontbriand was not looking for a career in wine in 2001, when her mother, Michèle Bazin de Jessey, retired from managing Domaine du Closel and its vineyard, Château des Vaults, and asked her to take over. At the time, Mrs. de Pontbriand lived in Paris, where she worked for a nonprofit helping people who had long been unemployed.
Still, she could hardly say no: women had run Domaine du Closel for generations, producing well-regarded Savennières wines, made with chenin blanc grapes.
But if the family’s wines were respected, they were also considered a bit stuffy, and the Savennières appellation — an area of about 8.1 square miles — rarely ranked among France’s most exciting.
Mrs. de Pontbriand did much to change that. She began pushing Domaine du Closel to embrace biodynamic farming practices — eliminating chemicals, allowing grass to grow as ground cover and relying on ambient yeast to ferment the grapes. Such practices elevated the quality of the grapes, especially their ability to reflect the terroir, or particular soil and climatic characteristics, of where they were grown.
“Being as close as possible to the rhythms that affect both the vine and the wine produced from it, helping the vine to help itself, to use living things to perpetuate life, seemed to me to be the path to excellence,” she told the website Decanter in 2020.