On LinkedIn, just one experience: ‘Michel Couvreur. Jan 1998 – present: 26 years and 11 months’. In other words, he knew the maturer-blender of whiskies aged mainly in sherry and port casks in Bouze-lès-Beaune as well as anyone, and he’s ensuring that his legacy lives on, alongside Cyril Deschamps and Alexandra Couvreur-Deschamps, his wife. Here are some explanations.
How did you meet Michel Couvreur?
At the age of 24, with a degree in vine and wine in my pocket and military service behind me, I was touring the region’s estates with Bernard Loiseau’s former sommelier. I discovered the story of Michel Couvreur, a former Burgundy wine and spirits merchant who set up in Bouze-lès-Beaune in the 1950s, before running a cellar in London, moving to Orkney in Scotland to distil his own whiskies and returning home to the Côte-d’Or, this time as a maturer-blender. An incredible career. I was seduced.
It can’t have been easy at first…
Michel Couvreur was a character. Before I arrived in 1998, he had always worked alone. Right from the start, he put me in the cellars… with a jackhammer in my hand. He praised patience. After a year at his side, he gave me a book from the Pléiade: ‘Les Présocratiques’. ‘To be done well, all manual work requires a form of intelligence. In this quest, music, painting, travel, philosophy… will nourish you, build you as a human being, and it is this sensitivity that will guide you’.
As you said, Michel Couvreur’s ‘signature’ whisky is still its ageing: how do you source your barrels?
Once or twice a year, we go to the bodegas in Spain to taste the wines in casks. Freshly emptied, never rinsed, let alone cleaned, the barrels in question must have played a full part in making good wines. This is one of our absolute criteria. The cask trade has become such a business. What we bought on average for 300 francs 25 years ago is now worth 3,000 euros. Some bodegas have made it their core business, using the same tired, over-oaked, oxidised wine from barrel to barrel, before turning it into barbecue sauce and selling the containers at a premium. This has nothing to do with our partners, from whom we buy 80, 100 or more year old casks of oloroso, manzanilla or pedro jimenez… It’s a part of their memory that we take with us every time. They have to be confident to agree to pass it on to us. For example, I had to fight for over 5 years to buy a cask of Niepoort or identify myself at a test dinner with Equipo Navazos’ manager. In France, it’s easier: we speak the same language and we’re better known. So we’ve also acquired casks from Dominique Derain, Jean-François Ganevat, Stéphane Tissot, La Rectorie…
Why this attraction for sherry and port casks?
For one thing, their wood is saturated with wine, around 50 litres per cask. Each 80-100 year old cask weighs 50 to 100 kg more than a new one. Secondly, these are always old wines, with great complexity and notes of zan, liquorice, bitterness, caramel, toast… As the alcohol is volatile, it captures all these aromas, which are present in large numbers. Some producers give their whisky barely a year to do this. We prefer to give the cask and the distillate time to meet and talk to each other, to speak with one voice.
How do you go about maturing the whisky?
We have two types of cellar. The first is dry. It’s a starter cellar that allows us to lose little alcohol concentration – 0.2 to 0.3% per year – and more volume – 2 to 3% per year – so as to develop the whisky’s energy and aroma. The other, very humid, has nothing to do with it. It is the soul of our house, the fruit of a crazy project. Between 1969 and 1972, with the help of one of the architects of the Mont Blanc tunnel, Michel Couvreur created a 100-metre-long gallery in the limestone subsoil of the gardens of his house in Bouze-lès-Beaune. There, the whiskies lose alcoholic strength – by 2 to 3% a year – and very little, if any, volume, in order to become rounder. From the start of the maturing process, each cask is given a code, along with projections. The aim is to try and imagine the profile of their contents in 5, 10, 12 years’ time, or even longer. Saline, the distillates matured in fino casks, for example, will bring freshness to the blend. They will be my light. Aged in moscatel barrels, the more peaty eaux-de-vie will enhance the blend with their grilled, meaty notes. That’s my umami. All this means tasting our stock again and again, putting our feelings into words that everyone here can understand. So we have our ritual: on Friday mornings, we get together to agree on the descriptions in question and make sure we’re speaking the same language.
Then comes the blend..
Here, as in the finish, the key word is balance: the emotions come out of it. In other words, the alcohol is integrated, so there’s no sensation of burning, a silky texture on the palate and long finishes and persistences… Once these three notions have been brought together, the distillate is ready to be worked on. In broad terms. Because sometimes the ‘imbalance’ of a cask brings the necessary harmony to the blend. I’m thinking, for example, of very old casks. With their alcohol content down to 36-38%, i.e. below the 40% required for the whisky appellation, we can in turn lower the alcoholic strength of the blend, without using water, and so gain in complexity, concentration and energy, rather than diluting them.
So there are no ready-made recipes?
Yes and no. If I put together 5% of this, 10% of that…, it wouldn’t work. Each cask brings its own heritage, which evolves over time, depending on the wine initially contained, the vintage, the quality of the wood, its thickness… Nevertheless, our range includes around ten classics for which we have to guarantee a certain consistency. So it’s not just a question of recipes set in stone, but above all a question of taste and feeling. It’s like music: there are notes, a score, and the emotion linked to their interpretation, to the way you play them at the time. In this case, for me, it’s in the morning, in the semi-darkness of the humid cellar, in the peace and quiet, around, for example, the creation of one of our signature whisky, such as ‘Overaged’, a blended malt made from different casks, with notes of blond tobacco here, dried flowers there, or an exclusive creation. For one of our main clients in Seoul, we accepted the following brief: a rich, dark, elegant 12-year-old whisky with a hint of smoke, floral notes and a fair amount of intensity. I began by trying to define the contours of this blend, then identified the casks concerned one by one, before making an initial sample and taking into account the comments received. Then it was off to the bottling area, which is always made to order here. This is one of our special features. The whisky is filled by gravity, without a pump, corked and waxed, and labelled on the corner of the bottle. This is our identity. That’s why our customers appreciate us too.
Speaking of appreciation, how do you taste a whisky?
If it’s cold, as here in the cellar, the glass should be warmed in the palm of your hand to awaken its aromas. Unlike wine, however, whisky is not aerated and, once tasted or spat out, it is customary to inhale through the mouth and exhale through the nose to appreciate its long finish and persistence. Not to mention the service: preferably less than the usual 4cl. That’s enough, and it’s very pleasant at the end of a meal, to finish your it with a swig of whisky and retain its flavour for 10 minutes. I recommend it…
And what about the distillates?
Over the years, Michel Couvreur has built up an incredible stock. We now have 500,000 litres. Every year, 10% is used for our orders and 5% is lost through evaporation. Add to that our desire to constantly offer new creations, and we have to bring in almost 100,000 litres of distillates a year. It’s less and less obvious. With energy costs in particular, the quality of Scottish grain eaux-de-vie is tending to become smoother. So Cyril Deschamps and Alexandra Couvreur-Deschamps decided to launch their own distillery. It opened in January 2022, still in Bouze-lès-Beaune. It’s here, on the outskirts of the village, that we brew our beer by fermentation in open wooden vats, without filtration, using indigenous yeasts. This is followed by double distillation over a direct flame. Each batch of 2,500 litres of brew undergoes two 8-hour passes, and only the heart is kept, producing 250 litres of 65% distillate. Eventually, three different distillates will be produced: one peated for iodine flavours, another toasted for more body and the last, very light, to express as closely as possible the taste of the local organic barley grown by a group of local cereal growers. Next week, it’s the turn of our malt house to open its doors in Dijon. We’ll have the whole chain under control!
So many projects!
That’s the advantage of working for an independent, family-run business like Michel Couvreur. There are nine of us in total. All passionate, enthusiastic, versatile people, driven above all by taste, including Cyril and Alexandra as directors, their son Albéric, who is more involved in distillation, and me as cellar master. Decisions are taken more easily and more quickly. We’ve launched amphora ageing to see. ‘Satellite’ creations are launched every year, like this single mat aged partly in casks of mutated pinot noir from Domaine Chandon de Briailles. Soon, I’ll be going to New York, to Pascaline Lepeltier’s restaurant, to talk with Stéphane Tissot and the teams at the Belgian brewery Cantillon about our respective experiences with each other’s casks. We’ve kept a real sense of freedom and the open spirit so dear to Michel Couvreur himself.