Interview: Anselme Selosse
Truly an individualist, his work attracts deep admiration, but detractors too. For Selosse himself, vineyard expression is all, says Robin Lee, who took part in the 2016 harvest at the Champagne domaine
robin Lee meets the mouldbreaking Champenois and explores what lies behind his distinctive wine style
THERE IS A flicker in his silver-blue eyes. ‘When I was young, I was a stammerer,’ says Anselme Selosse. ‘I was terrified to be called on to recite. I would cut my hands and bandage them in order to avoid going to school.’ An interest in theatre eventually cured him. ‘My timidity came from too much pride,’ Selosse confesses, ‘but I found when I was playing a role and being someone else I could speak without a stammer.’
Today, Selosse the man and Selosse the wine are superstars in the Champagne firmament. To critics such as DWWA Regional Chair for Champagne Richard Juhlin, Selosse is ‘the magic man from Avize’ and ‘Champagne’s cult grower number one’, whose wines ‘have given Champagne a new dimension’.
Eric Asimov, writing in The New York Times concurs: ‘His Champagnes are like the man himself. They have assertive character, and they don’t try to please everybody. You either love them or you do not. I do.’
Over the years, Selosse has battled with the CIVC, now renamed the Comité Champagne, which governs the marketing of Champagne and decides the appellation rules. His idiosyncratic techniques, and the degree to which his wines deviate from accepted standards of typicity, have been questioned.
There have been negative reviews, too, led by Champagne expert Tom Stevenson, the most outspoken critic of what he considers to be Selosse’s ‘oxidative’ style. Stevenson has even included Selosse on a list of the region’s five most overrated producers.
The Selosse enigma
Perhaps part of the problem is that Selosse does not play the game. Simon Field MW, Champagne buyer for UK merchant Berry Bros & Rudd, says Selosse is ‘famously enigmatic’ and regretfully admits he received ‘a very prompt and polite but definitive refusal’ on the two occasions, 10 years apart, when he asked for a direct allocation. Selosse rarely submits samples to the press or to wine competitions; he does not have a marketing budget. He hardly travels and does not speak even a word of English.
Selosse’s Champagnes are scarcely easier to track down than the man himself. His singlevineyard cuvées Avize Les Chantereines and Cramant Chemin de Châlons are the rarest of all, sold only in box sets with the four other lieu-dits – and each year only six of these sets are allocated to the UK (see box p62).
Though none of his wines number among the region’s most expensive when they leave the cellar door (ranging between €67 to €137), prices skyrocket once they reach the secondary market.
‘I found a new universe, realised that what I had learned in school was not everything’ Anselme Selosse
The making of a vigneron
Selosse studied winemaking in Burgundy in the 1970s and this profoundly influenced him. ‘In Champagne at that time the idea of quality production in the vineyard simply did not exist,’ he explains. ‘In Burgundy, I witnessed a different relationship between those who produced and those who sold the wine, and it made a big impression. In
Champagne it was simply the more you produced the more you got paid. In Burgundy, even in those days, the wine was assessed for its quality and valued accordingly.’
‘In the old days, we would taste with pipette and tastevin,’ Selosse recalls, remembering the shallow silver saucers once used for tasting wines in the cellar. ‘But then they developed the INAO glass and everything changed. In modern oenology, aromas and colour are more important.’ And those are the qualities that the glasses emphasise.
‘The glasses were supposed to supplement the tastevin, which is better for assessing the taste, but they ended up replacing it.’ But by then, he continues: ‘I was already a smoker. For me it is taste, not aroma, that is the most important.’ And, he contends, ‘terroir is expressed by taste not by aroma’ – a conviction that is writ large in every glass of his sapid, textural Champagnes.
Shaped by Spain
In 1972 Selosse travelled to Spain, and the memory of that trip has remained with him. ‘I admired the big structures, the bodegas,’ he reflects. ‘They don’t just have a single person, or a family, but a team with at least two generations working together who make the wine. Everyone is involved. They had a love for everything they did that I never saw in Burgundy. This intensity of love was something I was looking for, something I needed to understand. I found a new universe. I realised that what I had learned in school was not everything.’
It was later during that same decade that Selosse met his future wife Corinne. ‘Outside work,’ he confides, ‘I have one passion: waterskiing. I was staying in the countryside where there was a reservoir and Corinne was there from Paris with her family. Someone introduced us. I didn’t know how to flirt, but she was impressed by my waterskiing skills.’
Today, Corinne’s Parisian sensibility is felt in the chic and luxurious decor of Les Avisés, the boutique hotel and gourmet restaurant that the Selosses created together after taking over the defunct Maison Bricout-Koch in 2008. Yet at the domaine itself, there is no female influence at all. In addition to Selosse’s son, Guillaume, there are just two cellar assistants – both local lads, and both named Jonathan – and even more unusually, there is not a single woman among the regular team of loyal pickers. None has ever worked for anyone else, and they are all used to Selosse’s ways. They sleep in a communal dormitory and dine together on meals prepared by Madame Selosse and accompanied exclusively by the domaine’s Champagne.
In his team’s esprit de corps, it seems that Selosse has managed to recapture some of the ambience he so admired in Spain’s bodegas.
A terroir revolution
Selosse – perhaps all the more because he is so approachable and not at all arrogant about his success – is revered by the younger generation in Champagne. These younger growers, who are not necessarily following Selosse’s example in terms of the style of his wines, are nonetheless inspired by his artistry and inventiveness in experimenting with techniques and exploring the boundaries of taste.
They are inspired, too, by his spirit of independence, his courage and foresight in having almost single-handedly overturned a system that tended to reward mediocrity and high-volume production, which worked almost entirely in favour of the grandes marques and especially the multinational brands, whose culture of secrecy and overall lack of transparency was the prevailing ethos.
‘He is a pioneer,’ says Christophe Baron, a trendsetting Washington State winemaker, now in the process of reinventing his family domaine in the Marne region of Champagne. ‘There are people who venerate Selosse’s wines and there are others who think they are faulty. It is a polarising style, but we need these wines. It makes you think. As a vigneron, I need that.’
Jean-Baptiste Lecaillon, chef de cave at Roederer, is another who holds Selosse in the highest regard. ‘Anselme has opened a window to a new wave of young growers who knew their viticulture but wanted to be part of the finished product,’ he says. ‘In the end, it is great news for Champagne that more and more growers understand that the quality of the grapes is essential to make a grand vin.’
The Selosse approach
Selosse’s work begins in the vineyards, where he eschews pesticides and herbicides, but also the dogmas of biodynamics, a system he finds excessively rigid. At vintage time, his team moves from parcel to parcel, picking at the precise moment of ripeness that Selosse desires: late, by the standards of the region. In some years, including 2009 and 2016, there might be considerable levels of botrytis; something Selosse doesn’t consider a problem, regarding it rather as an element of each vintage’s unique signature.
In the cellar, all the domaine’s wines ferment with native yeasts and at their own pace in 228-litre Burgundy barrels, around 20% of which are new. While malolactic fermentation is not encouraged, it is not blocked either: ‘I don’t know if the wines go through malo – we don’t perform analyses,’ Selosse declares.
Unusually, the barrels are topped up only three times every year: twice in the autumn and once again at the end of winter; and some, protected by a layer of yeast, undergo carefully supervised biological ageing, akin to that of
‘I don’t know if the wines go through malo – we don’t perform analyses’ Anselme Selosse