France’s 50 best winemakers: Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon of Champagne Louis Roederer
Cellar Master of the prestigious Champagne house: “In people and wine alike, it’s the shy ones that you need, not the loudmouths”.
Distinguished Cellar Master of a Champagne house that is mapping out the future for the entire Champagne region, Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon is a resolutely hands-on winemaker. #4 in Le Figaro Vin’s rankings, the visionary winemaker reveals the philosophy behind his success.
Founded in 1776 by Mr. Dubois and his son, the Champagne house really started to flourish under Louis Roederer, who inherited the company in 1832. Rather than buying grapes, Roederer chose to buy vineyards, meticulously selecting the very best parcels. In 1876, his son, Louis Roederer II, created the first prestige cuvée Champagne, designed for Tsar Alexander II, to which he gave the name Cristal. Later, during the 1920s, Léon Olry Roederer led the Champagne house, and, upon his death, it passed to his wife Camille. Her grandson, Jean-Claude Rouzaud, assumed responsibility for the company in 1975, deciding to consolidate the vineyards. Headed since 2006 by Frédéric Rouzaud, the seventh generation of the family, the Louis Roederer Champagne House is today one of the foremost producers in the Champagne region, propelled by the inexpressibly brilliant Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Deputy Managing Director and Cellar Master since 1999.
Le Figaro Vin: How does it feel to be crowned a winemaking champion?
Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon: There are a lot of us winemaking champions around! Wine is a passion for me. I’m lucky to lead the life that I lead, to be able to follow the evolution of the vines and the grapes right up to the final product.
Have you been training for long?
Every year marks the start of a new training session, a new exercise. Each vintage, we have a new match to play and, each year, we have the chance to get it right or to get it wrong. If we do get it wrong, we have to work out why we’ve been less successful with certain elements, so that we can improve the following year. Our training begins with our very first vinification, but it’s a profession that you learn with experience. Each year, you refine your style a little further. It’s a process of improvement that takes a whole career.
Who are your mentors?
I have had several mentors. I’ll stick to my teachers, as, to be a great champion, you need to have been well schooled. Our generation is perhaps somewhat more spontaneous than previous generations, but I think that formal training plays an important part. Amongst others, I had Denis Dubourdieu, who taught me to know and understand the Bordeaux region, as did Jacques Boissenot. Instead of talking about “mentors”, I’d rather talk about the people that I have met along the way. You learn about grape-growing from travelling around, heading into the field to meet people who are at the forefront of innovation in their region. You must have no qualms about going to speak to them and learn from them; each person has their own precise experience which feeds into the whole.
Is winemaking a team sport?
It is clearly a team sport. At five o’clock in the morning, it’s my teams who head out into the vineyards. To be a good winemaker over the kinds of surfaces that we cover, I think you also need to be a good manager. You have to be able to identify the role of each person, find out what they are good at, and, above all, let them express that little bit extra, and give meaning to what they do. That’s really fundamental. It’s very much for that reason that I chose to go biodynamic a little over 20 years ago. It wasn’t to join the Rudolf Steiner school of thought (Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue, was the founding father of biodynamic agriculture, ed.), which I still don’t understand to this day, but to give a certain freedom to my teams, to give them the power to play their part in this shared adventure. For that is exactly what this is, a shared adventure. Each stage in the process is important, and each person plays their part. So, yes, it is very much a team adventure, and that includes sales as well. It’s all very well to make good wine, but you also need to be able to get it distributed and sold. That’s very important too.
Has playing in the Premier League for so many years been difficult?
It is very demanding, yes. You have to keep on pushing – you have to be working on tomorrow’s Premier League today. You have to innovate again and again, without ever stopping.
What do you mean by that?
Wine goes through trends. There are some winemakers in today’s Premier League who will have disappeared tomorrow. In the wine industry, you need to be constantly innovating. That is what is so interesting in our profession: it’s about roots and tradition, but there’s also a great deal of innovation involved, as you need to be questioning what you are doing all the time. Sometimes, innovating is about reinforcing what you are already doing, but in a clearer, more effective way. My role as champion is, I think, to simplify. I have to make my teams’ work easier, both in the vineyard and in the cellar. I need to make things easier to understand, not complicate them. The more easily understandable things are, the more brilliantly they will be done by everyone.
What is the key to making a good wine: the players, the team captain, or the pitch?
It’s a whole combination. You need athletes – people with talent – and you need to get them to work together. It’s like blending wine. When you’re creating a blend, it’s not the strength of the individual personalities that counts – we know, when we taste wines individually, that a blend of the best wines is likely to make a good wine. The goal in creating a blend is to make a wine that is even greater than the sum of its parts. It’s not by blending champions together that you’ll make a champion – you need to find wines that are a little shy. The same thing applies when you’re creating a team: it’s the shy ones that you need, not the loudmouths, not the ones who have the most obvious talent. The shyer members of the team are often the facilitators, who bring the team together. Here, we return to the analogy of the football team: you need attackers and defenders, but also midfielders, who distribute the ball – it’s precisely this distribution of the ball which does all the work. That’s really important in a team. It’s for that reason that, both in my teams and in my wines, I consider the shy ones to be so important, as I know they are what will make the difference.
Have you had a good sponsor over all these years?
The Rouzaud family. I have been working for them for 35 years: I spent 16 years working with Jean-Claude, who hired me 35 years ago, and I have just finished my 16th year of working with Frédéric. The Rouzaud family is my sponsor and has given me the very best Champagne terroirs. They have given me Roederer and Cristal, and the chance to elevate them to an even higher level. They are my greatest sponsor.
What’s your favourite colour?
I have two favourite colours: white and blue. Why white? Because it’s the colour of chalk. Chalk represents purity and I always have this colour in mind when I’m blending. And blue? Because it’s the purity of the sky. I always imagine the white soil and the blue sky when I’m making Cristal. That’s what guides me, visually, at the blending stage.
What’s your favourite vintage?
I won’t call them my “favourite” vintages. They are, instead, watershed years: vintages which made me realise that I needed to change, ones in which I realised I wasn’t going in the right direction and needed to regain my bearings, or ones which taught me to be a better winemaker. 1996, 2002, 2012, and, I’d say, 2018 and 2019. They are all vintages which mark some kind of turning point for me. 1996 was the great revelation that the focus had to return to the grape-growing, even in Champagne. 2002 was the year when I really discovered climate change. There is something happening to our wines, which is not normal – or, at least, we are not working with the same material we were working with previously. 2012 is the halfway point in my conversion to organic and biodynamic methods – especially organic. It was a very difficult year. We had to work hard to keep the team together. We could have backed out and said that organic grape growing didn’t work, and then gone back to conventional methods. However, we did the opposite and accelerated our transition. For me, that was fundamental. And, in 2018 – more so than in 2019, in fact – it was the total transition to certified organic status for Domaine Cristal.
Have you ever chemically enhanced your vineyard?
Never. On the contrary, I think I’ve spent my career doing the very opposite. By distancing myself from chemical intervention with our switch to organic methods, I think I removed the chemical enhancement that was muddying the waters, so that each terroir can now express itself in all its glory once again.
Have you already had offers from other clubs?
Yes, of course. There have been numerous offers from other clubs in France and abroad. However, there’s a real bond of loyalty – and a real complicity – that has developed between the Rouzaud family and me.
Are you going to sign for another 10 seasons?
Yes, I’ll sign for another 10 seasons, without a second thought. In the Premier League!