White winemaker: Didier Dagueneau

A short piece I wrote for a feature on white winemakers in Decanter magazine in 2006

It is too easy to call Didier Dagueneau a rebel citing his long hair, the khaki ambulance with its red cross, naming the small road to his winery and house – Rue Ernesto Che Guevara, the vocal attacks on his fellow producers of Pouilly-Fumé and much else besides. But this trivialises his achievement.

The wines of Didier Dagueneau tower over the rest of the Pouilly-Fumé appellation, existing on a higher plain. He makes brilliantly three-dimensional wines, while too many of his fellow producers in Pouilly struggle to make it to two. The gulf between Dagueneau and most of the rest of Pouilly is not because Dagueneau has uniquely favourably sited vines. The reason is more prosaic and largely comes from the vineyards: low yields most importantly and then care to keep the vines in balance and do everything possible to make sure that the fruit ripens properly.

In the winery Dagueneau is as non-interventionalist as possible with wine moved by gravity. Oak is used only to give complexity and additional roundness. His best-known wines are Buisson Renard, Pur Sang and Silex as well as a very limited production called Asteroide from ungrafted vines. In 2002 he bought a vineyard in Jurançon, so that he could make sweet wines.