The Daughter Returns! A Chat With Fergus Clague

FERGUS CLAGUE
France, Languedoc, Gard

Our first arrival of 2021 was a special one. A new wine from our dear friend Ferg is always a cause for celebration and curiosity, with the wines developing as he continues his journey as a winemaker.

Fergus and his wife Vicky ran Hand Made Food in Blackheath for 21 years. In 2014, blown by a wind of change, Fergus and family arrived in the south of France. A chance meeting with Thierry Forestier, Yves & Vincent Moulin and Laurent Bagnol found him thrust into the heart of the natural winemaking community in the Gard.

His fourth, and latest release: Sa Fille is a welcome tonic to the short days and long nights, a bright, generous red that happily takes a chill and works fast to bring you a restorative dose of their southern French sunshine. We caught up with Ferg at home in the Gard, full of much needed energy & enthusiasm on the first day of our new lockdown.

Hey Fergus, how are you going today?

Hey fine, yeah. One thing we're really missing though is our Under The Bonnet visit! It was always a good excuse for a catch up. The little wine fair Quilles De Joie was all cancelled of course. There was a nice little ‘fete du vendange’ just at the end of September at Thierry Forestier’s place, just before the lockdown, though it was very low-key. But I’m very pleased that Sa Fille has landed safely in London!

So are we! What can you tell us about this one?

I’m really pleased with it; it’s only our fourth wine. It’s dedicated to my daughter Saffie, who came out for her 30th birthday with her family to help us make this one. That was in 2019, and we’d had this ‘pic de chaleur’ -a huge heatwave-  it was a major catastrophe for a lot of people. It was up to 40 degrees on the 21st June.

Pretty much everyone round here still treats the vines with sulphur. 2018 had been such an appalling mildew situation; so as you can imagine by 2019 everyone had become very cautious. The trouble is, sulphur plus intense heat equals burnt leaves; so there were some people’s vines that were absolutely devastated, particularly if they had been recently treated.

We have one little third of a hectare of old vine Grenache, probably between 80-100 years old, on this lovely soil they call ‘gres’ - a mix of limestone and clay. It’s a lovely little slope, but we didn’t have a big harvest. That year, not only was it very hot and very dry, and there was a lot of sugar, but some of the branches were burnt.

So I went to the Moulin brothers who make Pompom; who have a lot of surface. I went down there and picked a couple rows of Grenache, a much younger vine on a completely different soil, really mean, thin sandy soils. I had a potential 15% from my vine, and about 11% from this Grenache down on the plain.

It has 10 days whole-bunch carbonic maceration before basket pressing, the Moulin brothers’ Grenache went off like a bomb, completed malo and everything very quickly, in about 10 days. Our Grenache actually spent the winter in barriques- everyone round here had real trouble finishing the sugars as it had just been so hot. But we eventually brought them together and they work really well. 

It has a lovely tension, great acidity, but also that big, round, fruity old-vine Grenache, balanced with that super crunchy freshness. Great as an aperitif, slightly chilled. It’s really great with all of those spicy, middle eastern grills I like to cook. It's a fresh one!

How is the wine looking so far this year? Has the climate brought any fresh challenges?

I think the 2020 will be my favourite year so far, the wine behaved really well, went off like a bomb; it had finished everything within about 3-4 weeks.

Responding to the changing climate is a little bit of a frame of mind I think. I do pretty much everything by hand, and I went up to our slope the other day to give it a little end of season tidy, with a strimmer. It was full of yellow flowers, which were full of bees; and it was a real reminder the more you leave it alone, the more chance you give it of a really great biodiversity. For me, that brought me great pleasure, the vineyard telling me to leave it alone for it to be as full of life as possible.

Each year though is so different. The Moulin brothers, who are the only proper ‘paysan-vigneron’ down here, have a huge amount of experience, just working their crops, wine isn’t the only thing they do. They acknowledge the climate is getting more difficult but they’re also completely resigned to the fact that it’s the cycle of feast and famine, and it always has been. Which I suppose is a comment about the climatic conditions, but is also a state of mind.

Each wine you’ve released each year so far has been bottled as a different cuvee, will that cycle continue with 2020?

That's a good question. Each year I'm learning. I'm learning something in the vineyard and in the cave, learning the fundamentals really, from other people. So that’s one reason the wines have changed. The upside of it is that we’ve now made Gout Elles, Echappez & Sa Fille, which are all pretty much 100% Grenache, but they're all three very, very different expressions, which is interesting. Sa Fille particularly is very unusual.

Each year you're doing things slightly differently, slightly more carefully, aware of things that can make a big difference. So for example this year- 2020- I did a lot of remontage every day during the maceration. That’s made a difference to the extraction of both color and flavor, but also my lovely neighbor has got a massive walk in fridge, so we sat the grapes in his fridge for five days during the carbonic. Because last year when I was tasting stuff, I became aware of lots of people that were using cold macerations, it was something I wanted to try, 
I suppose maybe there'll come a point where they won't change so much, but I’ve still got so much to learn, so if there's a possibility of putting them in a walk-in fridge, then bloody hell; as things arise I’ll make the most of them.

For them to be their own thing each year is not everybody's thing but I’m a new boy… I’m an old new boy!

We’ve really been enjoying the work Victoria (Ferg’s wife) has been posting through the summer, particularly the prints of birdsong.

Oh good! I'm glad you've enjoyed it. Yeah, she's a real pro.

In fact the story of the silhouette of Saf on the bottle came from an event she did in the foyer of the British Museum. It was for a Grayson Perry thing, they made a load of installations in the foyer.

Vic made a ‘silhouette machine’ - a big cardboard corridor you walk into- into the unknown- and sit in the dark by a candle. Vic was at the other end behind a pane of glass. She’d draw the silhouette, pass the piece of paper out the other end to a group of mates with scissors, frantically cutting out. That’s where the silhouette comes from.

One of the things we’re most looking forward to- once things have opened up- is to be sitting at a bar in London, maybe Paris, sharing a glass with Saf and someone twigging that: 'that’s her gorgeous face!'

I’m really looking forward to seeing how she goes down!

NOW IN STOCK

2019 - ‘Sa Fille’ - Grenache - Junas, Languedoc

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A Chat with Fergus Clague

Fergus Clague

France, Languedoc, Junas

Born and bred in South London, Fergus and his wife Vicky ran Hand Made Food in Blackheath for 21 years. In 2014, blown by a wind of change, Fergus and family arrived in the south of France.

The wine story started when Fergus met Thierry Forestier, Laurent Bagnol, Yves & Vincent Moulin and Olivier Pichon at Quilles de Joie, a natural wine festival in Souvignargues (Gard), France. None of them were represented in London so he took a suitcase full of their wines and did tastings all over London with several importers. And it all went from there...

In 2015 they lived on a domain outside of Montpellier as negociants and in return for that they got to make a small amount of their first vintage, ‘Press in the Vines’, a soft and easy drinking Cinsault.

In 2017 they produced 900 bottles of 'Gout Elles', a blend of Grenache and Carignan. The name means 'grappions' - the little bunches on the top of the vines which people usually leave behind during harvest. At that point in time they still didn’t have their our own vines, so Thierry Forestier kindly let them pick the grapes he had left from his vineyard.

Then in 2018, they had the very first harvest on their very own parcel two miles away from their cave. They produced ‘Echappez’ and we now have it - right here - right now...


Tell us about the 2018 Echappez we have just received
I now rent a parcel of Grenache, it is 0.3ha on limestone on a lovely slope. The vines are about 80 years old. Last year was our first harvest and it was fantastic, we've had a really lovely crop. We had two tons of lovely grapes and produced a total of 1200 bottles.


What is the meaning behind the name?
Echappez is the imperative of 'escape'. It basically means 'get out of here'. For us it was partly about escaping from London.


How are you enjoying your life in France?
It's cool, we like it. We've got two teenage boys and they are both pretty happy.


How did the 2019 harvest go so far?
This year in July we've had over 46 degrees for a couple of days. I am a complete beginner when it comes to winemaking and had treated the grapes a couple of days before. They got burned really badly, I was devastated. But there were loads of people in the same boat as me. The heat was terrible and as a result the sugar concentration was quite high, so the issue was the yeast converting all of it.

In total we've harvested one ton, with a really high sugar concentration. So what we did was we went and we picked some Grenache that was lower in sugar at the domaine Mas de la Font Ronde nearby. So this year we've got two cuvees: one which is made from our own super ripe Grenache, and the other one of the less ripe Grenache from the other vineyard. They are both interesting and hopefully by next spring I can put them together, that's the idea.


Which wines do you enjoy drinking besides your own?
'Aramonix' from Thierry Forestier is pretty much 'THE reference' for me.


So, is Thierry a really good friend of yours?
Yes, it wouldn't have been possible without him. He has helped us a great deal and whenever I have a problem, Thierry is the first person I ring. He has been very generous. I do try and make up for it with my cooking skills. For example, this year we will be doing the cooking at theQuilles de Joiefestival for the 4th year in a row. That is just such a lovely event and as we don't get paid for it, that is my opportunity to make up for all the favours that everyone has done for me. Normally there are a couple of chefs who come out from the UK, too. It's a great opportunity for them to understand how to drink all day but then still put in a good evening's work!


What can you tell us about your future plans?
We've got a couple of nice two-year-old barrels coming from Bourgogne. This year we are going to do some barrel aging, partly because there is still some sugar left in the Grenache we've harvested this year. That really needs to be left in a barrel over the winter in order for it to finish.

Now in stock

Red

NEW 2018 Echappez - Grenache
"10 days of maceration carbonique, manually pressed in basket press - that’s why it has a really bright colour as it was lightly extracted. Aged in inox. We bottled it in May this year. It is a wine which has a potential to develop over time."

We can't wait to see where Ferg's journey takes him!

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