We sit down with the chef de cave of the prestigious Champagne house
Dom Pérignon's chef de cave, Richard Geoffroy, was in town recently to promote the 2002 vintage and Asia Tatler Dining stops for a chat with him about his thoughts on wine-making, why he dislikes food-wine pairings and his blog.
Asia Tatler Dining: How does one become a chef de cave?
Richard Geoffroy: I don't think there is a single path to becoming a chef de cave. I'm from a family of Champagne people and at first I wanted to break away and make it outside the wine world, so I studied medicine. After I graduated, I felt the attraction back to wine-making. I assume it's not the standard path.
ATD: How did you find moving from one field to another? Are there any similarities between the two?
RG: More than you would think. They both deal with life, or living substances. I think medicine helped me a great deal in the business of wine, with the dimension of listening, of intuition.
ATD: As chef de cave, you are responsible for picking not only the best grapes, but also when to make a vintage wine. Tell us a bit about your criteria.
RG: There are various ways of looking at grapes. The first way is to make sure they're ripe enough and this would apply to anybody within Champagne. I also need to know when the grapes are up to the character and the style of Dom Pérignon. There is a bit of intuition and experience involved. These grapes have to deliver proper presence and mouth-feel. It's major point of style of Dom Pérignon is the texture, the tactile dimension. It's highly recognised and it's as much from the vineyards as from the wine-making.
ATD: Does the personal preference of each chef de cave make a significant difference to the wines produced under his watch? Or are personal preferences over-ridden by the house style?
RG: It's a crucial question and I think there must be balance. The job of the chef de cave is to offer a fair interpretation of the vintage, to translate it into something salient and exquisite in the wine. In an ideal world, it would be harmonious dialogue between nature, the legacy of the Champagne house and the individual input of the winemaker. Time is also a revealing aspect to the whole matrix, because time reveals the nature of the wine.
ATD: Champagne is made from chardonnay, pinot noir or pinot meunier grapes. How does the character of the Champagne change depending on the percentage of each grape?
RG: Dom Pérignon is made out of two grapes, chardonnay and pinot noir, blended into a perfect balance, a yin yang. The two grapes are complementary in aromatics but more importantly, they are complementary in presence. On the palate, chardonnay is more front-middle and pinot noir is more middle and finish. If you blend them into a perfect balance, you will have the most complete presence, holding the notes from the first sensation to the aftertaste. You cannot have that quality from a single vineyard, or a single grape, it requires blending. When Champagne is properly blended, you have a seamless unrolling from start to finish. It's the ultimate quality.
ATD: You have worked with some great French chefs as well as Japanese ones: which cuisine do you think works better with champagne?
RG: I've been looking at Japanese cuisine for a long while, which is very pristine in character and texture-driven. Now I have the opportunity of looking into Chinese food and it's not as much about texture as about harmony. There is nothing more complete and balanced than Chinese cuisine. I'm not into wine and food pairing, it's about an encounter of two cultures to me.
ATD: Why aren't you into wine and food pairings?
RG: I was into wine and food pairing a long time ago, just to get the fundamentals. But now I think one has got to be more relaxed and not get too serious or technical. The meaning is more important than the pleasing of the taste buds. Food is loaded with history and meaning, it's the reason why food is so much at the centre of people's lives. What I've found in China and in Hong Kong is that often people are very shy in expressing their feelings, but when it comes to the food, they're very vocal. It makes it very moving, as soon as you get onto that topic, you have a connection.
ATD: Is the desire to forge more connections the reason you started your blog?
RG: The status of Dom Pérignon is so highly recognised and iconic, it is a reference. So what do you do with that? The major thing for Dom Pérignon to achieve now is to better connect with others.
ATD: What do you write about on your blog?
RG: I'm embarrassed because I put so much into the blog last year. I really don't know how I did it, I surprised myself, it came from deep inside. And for the past six or seven weeks, I' haven't been working on it. I will be back to the blog next week with my report of my visit to Hong Kong. I also have a video I wanted to show weeks ago, of a close friend, chef Tatsuya in Sydney. They made a big programme on CBS Australia on Tatsuya and I was interviewed on that programme to talk about my friendship with the chef and it's a very nice piece so it'll be on the blog soon.
ATD: Who do you follow?
RG: When I first started the blog, I thought it was going to be a dialogue and in fact the following is tremendous. And yet people are reading and taking the substance without much interacting. I was expecting more interaction, I hope people are not intimidated. To be very honest, I don't really follow other bloggers. Between my wine-making duties, the travelling, the blog, my family; I just don't have the time to read blogs that much. It's terrible. I want people to read my blog, yet I don't read others'.