Patrick Desplats
Patrick Desplats is one of the true originals of the Anjou natural wine scene. His work has always been driven by a desire to question the assumptions surrounding modern viticulture and winemaking. Over the years, that questioning has taken him further and further away from the conventional model of a winery and forged his radical commitment to letting nature have its way
Patrick spent ten years working as a vineyard laborer, growing grapes conventionally and becoming increasingly frustrated with the chemicals, repetition, and machinery involved. Then, in the late 1990s, he tasted a sulfur-free wine from Thierry Puzelat. It was a revelation. He immediately knew this was the direction he wanted to pursue, and in 1999 he founded Les Griottes, partnering with SĂ©bastien Dervieux (Babass) in 2001. Together they became responsible for some of the most influential zero-zero wines to come out of Anjou during the 2000s.
The partnership eventually ended over a fundamental disagreement about farming. Patrick wanted to abandon plowing altogether and eliminate his dependence on tractors and petroleum; Babass wanted to continue plowing. Patrick struck out on his own, and the years that followed became something of a grand experiment in rethinking what a vineyard could be.
He stopped plowing and allowed permanent grass cover to develop beneath the vines. He began abandoning the idea of uniform rows, instead planting trees throughout his vineyards and training vines upward into them. His Epona parcel became an extraordinary experiment in polyculture, with twenty-five different grape varieties planted together, all ungrafted and growing franc de pied. In his Caroline vineyard, named for his beloved old plow horse, century-old Chenin vines were trained onto saplings planted alongside them.
The philosophy is simple: Patrick wants to recreate something closer to a forest than a conventional vineyard. Trees provide biomass, the ground stays covered, earthworms and microorganisms remain active, and vines can climb rather than being forced into the low, uniform shapes that dominate modern vineyards. He sees this not as eccentricity for its own sake, but as an adaptation to a hotter, drier climate.
That same spirit eventually led Patrick to Georgia. After Thierry Puzelat heard about his experiments training vines into trees, he suggested that Patrick visit the country, where similar practices could still be found. Patrick made his first trip in 2016 and fell in love with Georgian qvevri winemaking. He returned determined to bring the technique home.
He installed his first two qvevri in 2019, producing a macerated white wine and a red. The following year he went all in, adding thirteen more. He gave up his conventional winery and moved production to the garden surrounding the tiny, unelectrified shack he had built beside his vines. By 2020, fifteen qvevri were buried throughout the garden, effectively turning the landscape itself into his cellar.
Patrick’s qvevri winemaking follows Georgian inspiration but is unmistakably his own. He works with whole bunches, thoroughly crushing the grapes by foot before they go into the amphorae, and his wines can spend around two months macerating before being pressed manually. There are no pumps, no electricity, no filtration, and no additives. Even the qvevri themselves remain in direct contact with the surrounding earth—Patrick believes the amphora should “sweat” and become part of the soil around it.
The wines that emerge from this strange and beautiful system are unlike anything else in Anjou. They tend to be remarkably low in alcohol, often intensely aromatic and textured while remaining light on their feet. His Caroline, for example, is a direct-pressed Chenin fermented in qvevri and has shown an almost astonishing combination of fragrance, purity, and delicacy.
Patrick's project is ultimately about much more than making natural wine. He is trying to rethink the entire relationship between the grower, the vineyard, and the tools used to make wine. After twenty years of working toward it, he describes his move to qvevri as a return to simplicity: no winery, no pumps, no electricity, just grapes, clay, earth, and time.
It is an unconventional way of making wine, but Patrick has never been particularly interested in convention. As he puts it, his way of living is simply an attempt to get closer to the wildness of nature and to leave dogma behind.
