L’ Elixir de Jouvence 2019

After spending some years in Paris as an Information Technology Engineer, Xavier Marchais left the city when he realized that what really attracted him was an artisanal approach of making pure, genuine wines. One day he visited the producer Mark Angeli, and what he has heard and seen – the wine as an interdependence of the living organisms, the soil, the cosmos, the energies, the nature as spirituality expressed on the vines – made him understand that his destiny as wine producer was definitively written.

The art of mastering the wine world par excellence, however, he learned it from another important figure of Loire’s viticulture, Olivier Cousin, with whom he trained, delving into the fluctuations of the land and listening to the sound of wine. It was also at that time that Marchais started to feel the need to work the land with horses, thus eliminating the use of tractors. His wine reasoning is based on analysis and examination, not on recipes.

It didn’t take a long time until Marchais was able to find a few hectares of vineyards in Faye d’Anjoy, where he finally started to put into practice all the ideas he had gathered throughout his learning process, welcoming the Vins S.A.I.N.S. movement, listening to nature, and feeling that since nature does not give him every year the same sort of wine, he had to reconfigure himself in each season, he had to renew his ideas in every single harvest.  And the harvest is only complete with labeling of bottles, with a soundtrack chosen by Marchais himself. Whit music, both the chenin and the cabernet franc reveal even more their unfathomable elixir.