Yannick Cadiou

As a winegrower, you don’t have much to do with trees, you might think. Yet winegrower and winemaker Yannick Cadiou, owner of a small estate in Chablis, is inspired by a book by Peter Wohlleben about the secret life of trees. Trees form a harmonious network with each other and their environment via above- and below-ground connections. And so do vines. And for Cadiou, that network is the most important thing in his work in the vineyard.

He is a wise man, that Cadiou. He doesn’t see much in technical aids. He tastes himself whether his grapes are ripe, he harvests them by hand and he leaves the wine in the cellar alone as much as possible. ‘The less you tinker with it, the better it is.’ Maturation is above all a matter of calmly waiting for the wine to reveal its complexity.

That sounds as if it all happens automatically, but of course it doesn’t. Yannick Cadiou studied agriculture and oenology and has almost thirty years of experience as head winemaker at the top estate Laroche in Chablis. It’s not a case of ‘let it blow’; he works with great care and skill. When Cadiou tastes his grapes to see if they are ready for harvest, he knows exactly what to look for. He harvests when the grapes still taste like citrus fruit and not yet like ripe pear, because then you are too late, he says.

Cadiou bottled his first own wine in 2018. The soil of his plots is full of lime – both in the form of pebbles and in that of kimmeridge, a soil type that is around 155 million years old and contains many marine fossils and minerals. It gives the Chardonnay grapes that grow there a characteristic purity and tightness, and the wines a fantastically clean, salty, very layered taste, with beautiful fruit and stimulating acidity. Cadiou adds a minimal amount of sulphites and does not clarify the wines, so that not a drop of flavour is lost. Purity and precision, that’s what he is all about. And despite – or because of? – his calm approach, this is a wine that exudes life.