The artist who became a Bordeaux vigneron

“Don’t filter your wine. Filter your customers.” This is clearly the most valuable bit of advice ever received by artist Fabrice Domercq. He quoted it to me both times we met recently, once at a tasting of his no-additive wines organised by UK importer Dynamic Vines and at a subsequent meeting I arranged because I was so intrigued by his story and its relevance to Bordeaux’s current crisis, in which all but the top layer of châteaux are running at a loss because demand for basic Bordeaux has fallen so much.

Domercq was born in Paris in 1965. As a young adult making his way in the worlds of art and design, he was drawn to Italy, where he spent 15 formative years “discovering love, food and wine”. His work has been exhibited, inter alia, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and Fondation Cartier in Paris, and he continues to create at home in Brussels, where he now lives with his Belgian wife and family. He works “not in a studio but always at the kitchen table. An onion skin can be as rich as marble — it’s just a matter of scale.”

What turned him into a vintner was his mother’s purchase of a house on the banks of the Dordogne on the northern edge of Bordeaux’s Entre-Deux-Mers wine region in 2006. “It was a very beautiful old wine house, very isolated,” he says. It also came with four hectares of vineyards whose produce had until then been sent straight to the local co-op. “So then I thought, ‘Why not try to create wine?’” His first reaction was to call one of the best friends he made in Milan in the 1980s, the designer Jasper Morrison. “We’re both a bit crazy and love to do things together.”

They started with a plot of just 0.6ha of grapes. “We knew nothing about wine except drinking it,” he says. “That was a good thing because if I’d known what was involved in producing wine, I’d never have started. But it all came very naturally.”

He was helped initially by a friend, Béarn vintner Paul Bordes, who would come to Bordeaux to consult informally with wine producers. At the end of a long day visiting châteaux, Bordes would drop in on Domercq to taste the young juices. “As I knew nothing, I was a very good pupil,” Domercq says.

A name was chosen for the business — Ormiale — apparently an amalgam of the names of Domercq’s sons Igor, Alexandre and Achille as well as Morrison’s son Milo.

The co-ops have three vintages in stock waiting for a buyer! The Bordeaux crisis is very good for me. But it’s a terrible situation

Morrison moved to Japan early on in the enterprise and so became less involved. But Domercq stuck with it and found himself commuting more than 900km from Brussels to oversee the project. (He still does an astonishing amount himself, even wrapping each bottle in tissue paper. “It’s a way for me to create something from A to Z,” he says.)

His customer filtration came into effect as early as 2009, by which he had made only a handful of vintages. Bordeaux négociant Jeffrey Davies, who specialises in promoting “garage wines”, small-production discoveries (including to American wine guru Robert Parker), became aware of Domercq’s work. They met in a car park in St-Émilion, where Davies stuffed Domercq’s wine samples into the panniers of his Harley-Davidson. Having tasted them and agreed a price, Davies offered to take the wines on board and sell them to the rising tide of Chinese fine-wine buyers.

Domercq declined on that occasion but slowly built up an international network of importers, in Belgium but also, according to the list on Ormiale’s website, the UK, US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Korea, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden.

How he manages to service all these markets with an annual production of only about 6,000 bottles, I cannot imagine. What is clear is that he sells less than 10 per cent of his production in France itself, which may be why so few French people seem to have heard of Ormiale. “I never felt involved in the Bordeaux wine scene,” he tells me with some pride. And indeed, when I asked around fellow wine producers in Bordeaux, none of them had heard of either him or the wine.

His professional life changed entirely in 2013, when a terrible growing season drove him to a nervous breakdown. He decided he wanted to divest himself of the responsibilities involved in managing a vineyard from so far away. “I don’t see the vigneron as a mythic figure. I don’t want to be chained to the vineyard, not having holidays. So I put together an approach for myself,” he says.

I don’t see the vigneron as a mythic figure. I don’t want to be chained to the vineyard, not having holidays. So I put together an approach for myself

“All the grapes from the family vineyard would go to the co-op and I decided I would just make sure to get fantastic biodynamically grown grapes, wherever they come from.” Domercq values his newfound freedom. “In 2020, for instance, I decided not to make any wine because I could see some juices were going to make 17 per cent alcohol wines, even if we picked early. I have no loan on my back so I could afford to do without that stress.”

In response to this uncomfortably ripe vintage, Domercq says he went in search of a way of imbuing his wines with freshness. By a huge stroke of luck, he came across an old man with an abandoned 16th-century limestone quarry for rent right in the heart of St-Émilion. It has a cool courtyard in which to complete the painstaking labour that constitutes Ormiale’s unique proposition — destemming every grape by hand, as recommended by the famous Pétrus winemaker Jean-Claude Berrouet. Hours of manual work keep berries whole but eliminate the harsh stems and the “brush” of grape flesh attached to them.

The quarry also has 200 sq m of caves that maintain constant high humidity and a temperature as low as 10C. “The barrels are always damp,” he tells me excitedly, “and the yeast work so slowly and fermentations take so many weeks that the extraction is so gentle. Beforehand I would never have imagined the impact on the juices of this setting.” He has made his 2021s and 2022s here, helped at harvest time by a troop of friends from all over the world, whom he accommodates in the family house in Entre-Deux-Mers.

Because his harvest team has to be summoned from so many different locations at least three weeks in advance, it can be difficult to choose exactly when to pick. “But it’s part of the way we do things. And at least it keeps us away from the local St-Émilion sport of seeing who can be the last to pick and end up with a wine at 18 per cent alcohol.”

From 2019, he has bought all his grapes from a biodynamic grower in Castillon, “the closest bit to St-Émilion”. The tragedy for Bordeaux is how easy it is for someone like Domercq to buy top quality grapes because they sell for so little money. “Imagine all these grape growers . . . They’re not winemakers and the co-op pays them nothing,” he says. “The co-ops have three vintages in stock waiting for a buyer! A 900-litre tonneau of Bordeaux Supérieur sells for €700, maybe as little as €500. But I can pay the growers on December 1 or January 1 and they’re delighted. The Bordeaux crisis is very good for me. But it’s a terrible situation.”

Domercq’s advice for any ambitious young winemaker anywhere in the world is that they should come to Bordeaux and take advantage of the current parlous state of affairs. “Land’s only €15,000 a hectare here, and houses are cheap, too. All the natural wine people want to set up in Jura or Loire but they should come to Bordeaux.”

Ormiale wines, including a rather delicious waste-not-want-not £68 one made from all the lees and sediment from his 2021 vintage, sell for up to £125 a bottle.

Tasting notes on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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