March 2007 Pygmalion in the Vineyard By Joe Ray A high-powered Paris CEO meets an underperforming little grape patch… Will it work? The French don’t tend to be the most adventurous people, and most of the time you can’t blame them. If you make some of the best wines and cheeses in the world, shaking things up isn’t always the cleverest of business decisions. But when getting good wine from your region is like squeezing juice from a rock, it’s time for a change. In Maury, in the shadow of the Cathar ruins near Perpignan, it took an outsider to make the leap. Curiously, that person wasn’t a Bordeaux or Burgundy transplant looking for a new challenge, but a Paris-based supermarket CEO with no wine-making background. It was a recipe that seemed to have “disaster” written all over it.

Olivier Decelle at his vineyard, Mas Amiel. © Joe Ray

Olivier Decelle, the former head of the frozen-food chain Picard Surgelés, bought the over-the-hill and out-of-fashion Mas Amiel in 1999. Why? Good question. When he saw the black, lifeless-looking ground cover he must have had an idea of what he was in for at the vineyard.

“It was a crazy thing to do,” he admits. It didn’t take the locals long to agree. His wine label printer thought he was a nut. When Decelle ordered the first run of his new-look labels in 2000—with a huge MA in block letters on a purple background—the printer stopped the presses and called Decelle to confirm. When told there was no error, the printer said he wanted his money up front.

A viticultural dream team
The wine-making philosophy at Mas Amiel embraces constant experimentation and taking greater-than-average risks—a game plan custom-made for a region in decline and in need of a big, quick turnaround.

“The Mas Amiel team modifies its approach to the land every year in response to what worked well in the previous years,” says Decelle with a robust confidence unheard-of in these parts 10 years ago. “These major changes in the way we manage our land and our natural material will be the basis of the great wines of the future.”

In the fields, Decelle had the good sense to bring in experts to fill the gaps in his wine-making knowledge. He was lucky to have enough money to hire the skilled people who could transform his wines and smart enough not to try doing it himself. Among his quick changes, he fired the existing team of winemakers and hired **Stéphane Gallet to replace them, got consulting help from biodynamics expert François Boucher and called on soil microbiologist, engineer and author Claude Bourguignon to help keep him on the right track.

From the beginning, he and his team tried every trick in the book to get the vines and soil back into shape. For several years, Decelle went the biodynamic route, which is a bit like ultra-strict organic growing with a big dose of something akin to hippie shamanism thrown in for good measure. Biodynamic practice takes into account things like the position of the stars and other natural occurrences, not only during growing but in the wine-making process. It may sound funny, but some of the methods worked: Planting hemp on certain parcels, for example, helped both to aerate the soil and to eradicate a worm-borne virus. The ever collected Decelle even got the local cops to go along with the marijuana plants he was growing in his backyard. Eventually, he decided that complete adherence to biodynamic rules was too constraining for Mas Amiel, but his production remains a very natural one.

Deeper into the soil…and the market
“Our goal is to get our roots to dig deep in a land that’s known to have difficult”—a.k.a. rock-hard—“schist-laden soil,” says Decelle. They churned up the ground between the rows of old vines, chopping off the roots to force them to dig deeper instead of spreading out horizontally. They also switched to much smaller Swiss tractors, abandoning the heavier traditional models that effectively steamrolled the earth.

Decelle’s winemaking team also took the curious step of installing thousands of giant wooden stakes, arranged in a tight grid and resembling a sort of Christo-like sculpture, on a part of the land, a measure designed to boost vine density and allow more grapes to be grown on a smaller parcel. Though it’s still in the experimental phase, he says preliminary results are encouraging.

For his part, Decelle pitched in where he could do the most good—calling on his marketing know-how from his frozen food days. With a wine of higher-than-average quality coming from a region with a lower-than-average reputation, he knew he was a bit too far ahead of the curve for the French market. To build his reputation he concentrated on exports, since the rest of the world tends to be more willing to experiment than his Gallic countrymen.

“We got a good team together, took a new look at marketing and went all around the world so we could sell the products we believed in,” he said.

Wine and chocolate
Not every experiment they tried worked, but the overall approach did: Results were almost immediate for the dry wines, and a cult-like following quickly developed around the sweet wines. Luck also helped in the estate’s quick rise, as some of the sweet wines had the extremely rare quality of going well with chocolate.

With the vineyard’s reputation bolstered by strong reviews in the worldwide press, including praise from wine critic Robert Parker, Decelle turned his attention back to the French market, where suddenly, purple labels had become much more palatable. France now represents 79 percent of Mas Amiel’s sales.

Decelle’s efforts are much of the reason why Maury wines are seeing a long-awaited resurgence on Parisian tables and bringing new attention to the region. “Our experiments with our dry wines are now being followed by a new generation of winemakers here,” said Decelle.

Though he’s quite modest about the changes he’s helped bring to the region, perhaps the best sign of success is the new trend in labels for neighboring vineyards’ bottles: They’re purple.

Joe Ray is a Paris-based journalist specializing in food and travel. www.joe-ray.com.

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