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Clos Rougeard
Saumur, France1 wine
The Foucault brothers made Saumur-Champigny serious - Le Clos, Les Poyeux, Le Bourg, and Brézé - sold to the Bouygues family in 2017.
Clos Rougeard has been in the same family at Chacé, near Saumur, since 1664, and for most of the last half-century it was the work of two brothers: Jean-Louis "Charly" and Bernard "Nady" Foucault, who took over in 1969. They spent decades making Cabernet Franc seriously, at a time when the Loire's reds were treated as cheerful and disposable, and they did it with organic farming, long élevage in barrel and no interest in explaining themselves. Charly Foucault died on 29 December 2015, aged 66.
The estate makes three reds in Saumur-Champigny, ordered by site rather than by hierarchy of ambition. Le Clos comes from fifteen clay-limestone plots and keeps the crisp, floral, spicy side of the grape. Les Poyeux is a three hectare parcel in front of the estate on a gently sloping hill, on clays over draining aeolian sands. Le Bourg is a walled parcel in the middle of the village of Chacé, very old vines on a thin clay loam directly over limestone. There is also Brézé, a Chenin grown on limestone.
In 2017 the estate was sold to Martin and Olivier Bouygues, whose family also owns Château Montrose in Saint-Estèphe. Hervé Berland, already running Montrose, took the same role at Chacé, Nady Foucault stayed on as technical adviser overseeing a conversion to biodynamics, and Jacques-Antoine Toublanc came in as winemaker. Some practices have shifted since: the share of new oak on Le Bourg, entirely new in the Foucault years, has come down.
