Olivier Cousin Le Cousin Rouge Vielles Vignes Grolleau

The Man... Olivier Cousin provides a textbook example of non-interventionist winemaking, and natural farming. He plows using a horse named Joker. His vineyards are certified organic and biodynamic. He uses indigenous yeast to start fermentation. Notable are what does not go into Cousin’s wines: no sulfites, no sugar, no enzymes. The wines macerate for very long periods, which is possible because of his yeast choice and the naturally cool Loire autumn.

The Sulfites... Or at this address, the lack thereof. The word is a catch-all for the measurable amounts of free sulfur dioxide, sulfurous acid, bisulfate ion and sulfite ion found in a wine. Grape growers use forms of sulfur as cleaning agents, and as a preservative. Its use has been common in wine production for millennia. The legal limit for sulfite concentration in wine sold in the United States is a whopping 350 parts per million. Wines identified as organic in the U.S. are allowed to contain up to 100ppm, though most contain less than half that amount. Cousin’s wine contains almost none, only the trace amounts that are a natural by-product of alcoholic fermentation.

The Land... Olivier Cousin’s hometown of Martigne-Brilland possesses exceptional terroir, and has been considered a noteworthy vine-growing village of Anjou since the beginning of the 19th century. Anjou is a region that stretches for 100 kilometers along the western end of the wide, slow Loire river. Anjou ends just to the east of Muscadet country. It is the largest wine-growing region along the Loire: nearly a million hectoliters of Anjou are produced per annum, from over 16,000 hectares of vines. In the past this wine was mostly white and rosé (pink wine still accounts for nearly half of the Anjou made), but since the 1980’s more red wine has been bottled in the area to replace the waning demand for the typically off-dry Anjou rosé. The soils of this large region vary, but generally are composed of gravel, sand, limestone and marl.