Yannick Amirault, 2020 St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil ‘Les Malgagnes’ Amphore
Cab Franc du Jour #94
Domaine Yannick Amirault is one of the elite producers across both the Bourgueil and St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil appellations. Today, Yannick and his son Benoît continue the devoted work of the land that Benoît’s great-grandfather Eugène began in the 1930s. When Eugène established the domaine it was a polyculture estate, very much in the Ligérian tradition, with fruit trees, asparagus, and livestock alongside the vines. Yannick was deeply influenced by his grandfather’s philosophy of working the land as respectfully and holistically as possible, and when he launched his own domaine in 1977 it did not take long before he abandoned chemical and synthetic treatments, slowly working toward organics in the vineyard and a traditional approach in the cellar.
The estate today has vines across both St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil and Bourgueil, totalling about 20 hectares. But Les Malgagnes is where it all began. Eugène planted his first block here in 1936, and the first bottling came in 1947. When Yannick launched his own domaine, he began with those same parcels, and grew the estate from there.
St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil and the Côte
A few features distinguish St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil from Bourgueil in terms of terroir, and one of the most important relates to the viticultural area and its soils. Just past the village of Bourgueil, the Loire takes a slight dogleg, which causes the ancient alluvial terrace to widen as it enters St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil. As a result, the ancient alluvium accounts for roughly 65% of the vineyard area in the appellation, and as that terrace expands, the zones of recent alluvium and the côte, where the tuffeau chalk-dominated soils are found, narrow considerably.
Les Malgagnes is located on the slopes, and a few things are worth noting about the côte in St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil specifically. The sloped area is quite narrow and becomes narrower still as you move from east to west, from around 500m wide near the Bourgueil AOP boundary to only about 200m wide past the hamlet of La Gardière. At elevations of around 60 to 67m above sea level, the tuffeau chalk-derived soils appear, but crucially, only the Middle Turonian tuffeau chalk is found on the côte in St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, the glauconitic-micaceous chalk, whereas in Bourgueil both the Middle Turonian and the Upper Turonian yellow tuffeau are present. The topsoils here are also much more dominated by sand and silty-sand than by clay.
Les Malgagnes
The lieu-dit of Les Malgagnes covers about 14 hectares and has long been regarded as one of the top premier-cru level sites in the appellation. Its distinction is well earned. It sits at the easternmost part of St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil, only about 350m from the western boundary of the Bourgueil commune, where the band of tuffeau chalk-derived soils is at its widest in the appellation. What makes it additionally special is the higher proportion of clay found in the topsoils here compared to the rest of the côte in St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil.
Yannick Amirault holds 3 hectares in Les Malgagnes, divided into two distinct plots. About 2 hectares are allocated to the single lieu-dit bottling, though the selection for the cuvée typically draws from only 1 to 1.5 hectares of those vines in any given vintage. The selection is made from the upper portion of their parcel at mid-slope, on the Middle Turonian tuffeau chalk with a higher clay content in the topsoil. The parcel contains four generations of plantings: 1936, 1973, 1980, and 1998.
In the Cellar
In some vintages, Benoît produces two bottlings of Les Malgagnes: a “Classique” and an “Amphore.” The winemaking is identical for both until bottling. The fruit is hand-harvested, destemmed, and fermented as whole berries with indigenous yeast in conical wooden vats, with approximately three weeks on skins, punchdowns at the start of fermentation followed by very light pump-overs thereafter. No press wine is used in the finished cuvée. Aging is deliberately brief to maintain the freshness of the fruit, running about 12 months divided equally between oak barrels (half of which are new), small conical wooden tanks, and amphora. In most vintages, Benoît tastes through the amphora just before bottling and makes a separate selection for the Amphore cuvée at that point.
The 2020 Amphore bottling has an additional point of distinction. When harvesting that year, the fruit from five rows of the 1998-planted vines was of such exceptional quality that Benoît chose to vinify and age it separately. The winemaking followed the same approach, but the élevage was done entirely in amphora with no wood involved at any stage.
Wine Details
Producer: Yannick Amirault
Appellation: St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil
Commune: St-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil
Lieux-Dits: Les Malgagnes
Soils: Sandy-silty clay (limon-sablo-argileux) over the Middle Turonian tuffeau chalk
Alcohol: 14.0%