DIDIER DAGUENEAU:DIDIER DAGUENEAU, who has died in a flying accident at the age of 52, was a French winemaker and one of the greatest Sauvignon Blanc wine producers in the world.
He was outspoken and brilliant and lived life to the full. Even after settling on winemaking as a career, he remained true to the pursuit of reckless sports, making a name for himself in the world of sled dog racing, in which he won the European and world championships. He was killed in a microlite accident in the Dordogne region of southwest France. According to a report in Decanter magazine, the microlite stalled after take-off, plunging 50m before hitting the ground.
Unlike many winemakers in the Pouilly Fumé and Sancerre regions, he did not start his career in wine and raced sidecars in his youth. He said it was only after "two falls in quick succession" that he went into winemaking.
Constantly on the quest to make the greatest Sauvignon Blanc in the world, he produced several wines from vineyards scattered around his winery in the hilltop village of St-Andelin in Pouilly Fumé. Notable wines included Buisson-Renard (orginally the vineyard was called Buisson-Ménard, until a wine writer misread the label), Pur Sang, and Silex - perhaps his most famous wine.
He owned several plots of land scattered around St Andelin. The Buisson Renard covered 1.5 hectares and the 3-hectare La Folie vineyard - hidden on a slope between two small forests - provided the Sauvignon Blanc for, among others, both the Pur Sang (Thoroughbred) and Asteroïde cuvées. The latter was made from 18 rows of ungrafted vines and produced only 200 litres a year. It was priced accordingly, at €460 a bottle in January this year.
The Bois de St Andelin vineyard provided the grapes for the Silex cuvée. Further up the road was the tiny Clos du Calvaire, the only walled vineyard in the region, and no bigger than a small rounders pitch. Dagueneau also planted a minute vineyard on the Les Monts Damnés in Sancerre, and produced Les Jardins de Babylone Jurançon with friend Guy Pautrat.
Known as the "wild man of the Loire", Dagueneau was notorious for his outspoken opinions, frequently attacking winemakers in the region for their lax attitude towards winegrowing and winemaking practices. He was equally critical of members of his family.
"I had a few scores to settle with the family," he said in an interview in Decanter, describing his entry to the business. "So I decided to make wine, to make better wine than them. That was my first motivation. So I decided to make the best Sauvignon Blanc in the world. Not at all pretentious for someone who's been making wine for two years."
His winery was small but pristine, well-arranged and modern. Above its entrance, a bras d'honneur (the offensive gesture where the bicep of a crooked arm swings into the palm of the other hand in a dismissive manner) welcomed visitors and defied the winemakers of the surrounding region. Quotes such as "No need to conquer if everything is for sale" and Che Guevara's "Be a realist, demand the impossible" adorned the white walls.
He was competitive. "I want to be the best," he told Wine Spectator magazine in 1995. "If you want to be the best, you need the methods and techniques to get you there. Your vines must bear the best grapes; your vinification must be the most rigorous. There are no recipes. It's all the details of viticulture and all the details of winemaking, the assemblage of little things, which makes for the minute differences between a good wine and a great one."
Known for his wild mane of unkempt hair and bushy beard, Dagueneau was an iconoclast among vignerons. He had no formal wine training and used methods uncommon to Pouilly-Fumé, including severe pruning for drastically low yields, hand-harvesting of fruit over several successive passes through the vineyards (known as tris in French), vineyard specific bottlings and barrel-fermentation. Dagueneau's wines steadily became the unchallenged qualitative leaders of Pouilly-Fumé.
Did fame go to his head? "Egoist, no; generous, yes; intransigent, yes; but not egoist," he told Wine Spectator. Asked about his future plans, he replied: "Minister of agriculture, that's really tempting."
He is survived by his partner Suzanne, and four children.
Didier Dagueneau: born 1956; died September 18th, 2008