Producer Spotlight: Domaine Tariquet
The below article was written by Anne-Charlotte de Langhe and was published in Los Echos.
THE GIANT OF THE “PETIT BLANC”
Domaine Tariquet's light white wines are an irresistible success. Within forty years, this estate from the Gers has become the largest in France.
Tariquet, this artisan white wine turned white wine giant
By Anne-Charlotte de Langhe
In the heart of the Gers, the Grassa family has achieved the feat of creating a French champion in the very fashionable colour of the moment. Long loved by the English, this slightly tangy and low-alcohol wine is a star as far away as Japan. Trade secrets.
More than a duty, it is a peaceful routine. For many years, be it summer or winter, Maïté Grassa has been getting up at 6 a.m every morning. Wearing a raincoat and felt hat, without hurry, this discreet 78-year-old woman from Gascony walks along the small path separating her home from the family estate, a winery in the Gers desert between Auch and Mont-de-Marsan. Tariquet may be a castle, but she speaks of it as a "home". For a short moment, she takes her eyes off the vine, then weaves between the boxwood, hydrangeas and rose bushes, until she reaches the steps of the manor house and its two towers. The eldest of the place gives herself until 7:30 a.m. to do everything properly, turn on the lights, fold down the shutters until they lie flat against the ancestral yellow stone. The ritual is, after all, meaningful: "I don't want employees to arrive and see the shutters closed.” With this gesture, at once mechanical and symbolic, she undoubtedly wants to remind them that they are at home here. Or perhaps, too, that work does not wait. A way to set an example.
This fervour for the work, transformed over five generations into a family tropism, says a lot about the commercial success crafted by the Grassa family to the point of being considered today the most significant wine growers in France. Stubbornness, dedication, boldness, patience: it took all these qualities -- and in high doses -- to make Domaine Tariquet an emblematic brand in the South-West, now exported to more than 60 countries around the world. These wines have become the mascot of Toulouse student parties; the promise of a sweet state of intoxication at a competitive price for bistros in Occitania and elsewhere; in the eyes of foreigners, the idea that a good wine does not necessarily wait for the number of years. Such a fate would not have displeased those who were the first to believe in it, in this corner of France once exclusively associated with two heroes: Armagnac and d'Artagnan.
DOMAINE TARIQUET’S UNBELIEVABLE NUMBERS
- The Grassa family owns 1,125 hectares of vines of its own, 100 of which are dedicated to Armagnac.
- Some 400 hectares of forests, hedgerows and lakes preserve biodiversity.
THE FAMILY LEGEND
However, don't expect the Grassa family to flaunt their flamboyant success. Here, people like to naturally cultivate a certain reserve, although a taste for showmanship once figured in the genes. Because, long before being wine growers, in the family, we were first and foremost "bear trainers". A national sport, or close to it, for the young people of Ariège whose horizon was limited, in the nineteenth century, to what the mountains could offer. But when Pierre Artaud – Maïté's great-great-grandfather – chose to leave his village of Cominac and its Aulus valley in Ariège in 1885, after having tamed and trained a Pyrenean bear cub, it was to explore more distant horizons.
Next stop: London, no less. He embarked in Le Havre, headed to England. Family legend has it that the queen, amazed to see plantigrades dancing near Buckingham, invited the young Pyrenean bear trainer under the gold of the palace to entertain the children of the court. Crossing the Atlantic next, the daring man bet on an even better life, which his offspring would soon envy him. His eldest son, Jean-Pierre, followed in his footsteps. A bartender in New York, he saved salaries and tips before winning the heart of Pauline, a governess in the service of opulent American homes and a native of a village next to his own in Ariège.
But Artaud father and son were thinking about their retirement from the vagabond life, dreaming of an anchorage closer to their roots for the future. Visiting the Château du Tariquet, in Eauze in the Gers, was, for them, "love at first sight", confides Maïté Grassa, who is as viscerally attached to this 17th century building as her ancestors were. They acquired it in 1912, shortly before the First World War recalled Jean-Pierre to the flag. For seven years, tirelessly hoping for her husband's return, Pauline, who had remained in New York, walked down the port of Manhattan weekly, only to find him in France in 1922, wounded, terribly weakened, with partial memory loss.
- The estate extends within a perimeter of 30 kilometres around the castle and counts 6 Armagnac cellars.
- The longest row of vines is 1.8 km long.
- The harvest in Tariquet mobilises 40 people for 2 months.
- 10-million bottles of wine and 130,000 to 150,000 bottles of Armagnac are sold each year. The cheapest wine costs €4.50.
- The largest vinification tank contains the equivalent of 330,000 bottles.
- Domaine Tariquet’s range consists of 11 white wines (including 2 sweet wines), 2 rosés, 1 sparkling wine and about fifteen Armagnacs.
THE LARGEST SINGLE-FAMILY ESTATE
Their daughter Hélène was born three years later, on the Gers farm. At the time, Tariquet was not at all shiny: a little livestock farming and a few fields of corn to make up for 7 hectares of vines in a pitiful state, miraculously rescued from phylloxera. As Rémy Grassa, 47 years old and current co-owner of the estate, rightly tempers, "we don’t move suddenly to something big". To achieve this, Hélène will be able to count on the son of the neighbouring farmers, a certain young man named Pierre Grassa.
He, too, has seen his fair share, after his parents' exile between Aragon and Béarn: a father recruited on the construction site of the Somport tunnel, a literacy taught by the Joinville battalion, an experience as a cowherd followed by a career change as a talented hairdresser for ladies in Bordeaux, and some salty memories as a lifeguard on the Arcachon basin.
"As a teenager, he always tried to spend time with people who could give him a boost, teach him," says his daughter Maïté. “He stopped at nothing, not even cycling 160 kilometres to go to work.” At the end of the Second World War, Pierre Grassa married Hélène Artaud. The resurrection of Tariquet, the flagship of the IGP Côtes-de-Gascogne, is the result of their unwavering union.
Today, looking as far as the eye can see across the estate’s infinite parcels – more than a thousand hectares, making it the largest single estate in France – allows us to measure how far the Grassa family have come, and how open this agricultural dynasty is to modernity. If Pierre Grassa "venerated this nourishing earth and breathed nature" while growing his young plants from cutting, he readily believed in progress. Rather than newly built, he preferred the renovation of existing buildings. A sign? It was on his doorstep that, at the beginning of the 1950s, the first tractor in the department was delivered. Hélène and him also revived the production of Armagnac, set about expanding the estate, and played the card of complementarity without hesitation.
"She had married the whole package," says her descendants. “We later understood that he had taken her on board with his project without imagining that she would keep up to such an extent.” As the eldest daughter, Maïté is the first to join this pas-de-deux. From a very young age, she had the makings of a businesswoman. She wore her hair short while her sisters kept it long, and she pruned the vines to the last row. "Come on! A little more!”, her father would order at the end of the furrow. “One less thing to do tomorrow!” With hindsight – and after having "changed jobs many times without ever changing location" – the septuagenarian admits that, for a long time, she felt like she was "invested with a mission" by parents who "should not be disappointed".
GOOD AS CANDY
After a few seasons spent weeding corn ("I resented my father, but it was for my own good"), Yves, Maïté's brother, gave a considerable boost to Tariquet's development. Restructuring the vineyard, choosing noble plants, summoning bankers, etc.: between two trips to San Sebastian or Marbella in a 2CV with his three sisters, this self-confessed country man began a revolution. Until then only sold to merchants in barrels, the estate’s Armagnac would be bottled on its premises!
The early 1970s saw Maïté and Yves at the wheel of a Renault 5s or white Simca go to delicatessens, canvassing wine merchants. One must imagine the performance: at the time, in the depths of the Gers, the only major road was the 124 national road that connected Toulouse to Mont-de-Marsan. But this does not dampen the Grassas' conviction: "Samples on the way out, orders on the way back!” A second
masterstroke came in 1982: to alleviate the Armagnac crisis, part of the Ugni blanc harvest was kept for winemaking rather than distillation. A wine made in Gers? "Aberration!” they are told. And indeed, no one believed in the ability of this grape variety to produce quality dry white wines.
However, the following year, Classic, the estate’s first wine, came out of a local wine competition in Montpellier crowned with the gold medal. The Parisian wine merchant Lucien Legrand, a member of the jury, announces, by phone, the happy news to the Grassa. Their joy is immense, their incredulity touching, the triumph imminent. "We put the cart, then the oxen, and behind them we push!" urges Yves, an instinctive man constantly looking for additional hectares. And right he was.
Because five years later, at the Wine Fair in London, the same wine also won first place. The English discovered and fell in love with this thirst-quenching dry white wine, light in alcohol, in which the Grassas left a hint of residual sugar to give it that slight tangy taste that pleases so much across the Channel. It was the beginning of a success story. In 1992, Tariquet innovated again with Premières Grives, a late harvest refreshed by beautiful acidity, continuing the estate’s tendency for the little white wine, as good as candy.
The sommeliers of the famous Parisian restaurant Le Taillevent will hardly dare to admit that it is Tariquet that hides behind the sober formula of "The dish and its glass of wine" menu. Eddie Barclay, on the other hand, politely demanded that "a pallet of this little white wine with an almost beady mouthfeel" be delivered to him in Deauville.
Wherever they go on the estate nowadays, be it on the banks of the Izaute flowing below the castle or from one hillside to another aboard their 4x4, the brothers Rémy and Armin Grassa, Yves' sons, keep in mind the entire genesis of these various advances. Thick as thieves, as their grandparents were, and hand in hand with their aunt Maïté, neither of them regrets having been thrown "unceremoniously" into the deep end when it came time to earn their stripes. True to the saying that "nothing grows in the shade of great oak trees", Yves gave them free rein and his passion for grape varieties, as he jumped from one project to another, going as far as Eastern Europe. There is "no net with a tight enough mesh to hold him," anyway, says Rémy about his father.
WORKING TO PRESERVE THE SOIL
Since 2005, the next generation has been working to leave its mark, revolutionising farming methods, investing in a vast research and development plan, and working tirelessly to preserve the soil. "Committed to the field, determined to see things through to the end, they leave no room for uncertainty," notes Laurent Dumortier, founder of Bioboon, the company supporting Tariquet in its use of entirely natural treatments without the risk of pesticide residues. Equal attention is paid to the new means put in place for wine production, such as this method of harvesting in closed tanks protecting the grapes from oxidation, or a cold vinification process. Inside and out, the gigantism of the vats contrasts with the extreme care taken with the product.
As sales agent for the estate for twenty-five years, Philippe Sarraute dreams of offering a visit to the Bordeaux wholesalers he approached in vain in his early days. Some criticised him for wanting to highlight this wine from another region, whose name would soon appear on the slates of countless café terraces. Since then, he says, "the machine has never stopped...” . Tariquet is now even the official wine of Japanese oyster farmers. And since the consumption of white wines is on the rise everywhere, the future is looking rather bright.
On the other side of the path along the castle, the historic Tariquet distillery is still there. Near the two copper alambic stills under which Armin and Rémy, as children, held a lump of sugar, where at the corner of the fireplace the soot merges with the angels' share, the place looks a little like a tavern with good-natured tables. On a mud wall hangs a black and white portrait of Pierre Grassa taken during a trip to Havana. His laughing eyes and the grain of his hands recall his taste for well-made things and cigars, his way of rolling the "r's" and his passion for Puccini's Tosca.