Evelyne de Pontbriand, a former French teacher who had no formal experience in winemaking when she took over her family’s winery in the Loire Valley, but nevertheless made it a leading example of organic viniculture and herself an internationally renowned voice for sustainable farming, died on Nov. 5 in Angers, France. She was 73.
Her husband, Gaël de Pontbriand, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by cancer.
Mrs. de Pontbriand was not looking for a career in wine in 2001, when her mother, Michèle Bazin de Jessey, retired from managing Domaine du Closel and its vineyard, Château des Vaults, and asked her to take over. At the time, Mrs. de Pontbriand lived in Paris, where she worked for a nonprofit helping people who had long been unemployed.
Still, she could hardly say no: Women had run Domaine du Closel for generations, producing well-regarded Savennières wines, made with chenin blanc grapes.
But if the family’s wines were respected, they were also considered a bit stuffy, and the Savennières appellation — an area of about 8.1 square miles — rarely ranked among France’s most exciting.
Mrs. de Pontbriand did much to change that. She began pushing Domaine du Closel to embrace biodynamic farming practices — eliminating chemicals, allowing grass to grow as ground cover and relying on ambient yeast to ferment the grapes. Such practices elevated the quality of the grapes, especially their ability to reflect the terroir, or particular soil and climatic characteristics, of where they were grown.
“Being as close as possible to the rhythms that affect both the vine and the wine produced from it, helping the vine to help itself, to use living things to perpetuate life, seemed to me to be the path to excellence,” she told the website Decanter in 2020.
She wasn’t the first in the Savennières appellation to take up biodynamic winemaking: Nicolas Joly had been doing it since the 1980s. But with her fluency in English and flair for public relations, she became a leading spokeswoman for the practice and the appellation.
She opened the winery to visitors, feting them with dinners, music festivals and immersive tours that she often led herself.
In 2008, Mrs. de Pontbriand was elected president of the Savennières appellation, taking on the task of organizing the 36 growers within it. She held the job for eight years, and during that time the global reputation of Savennières wines soared.
Mrs. de Pontbriand traveled widely in her efforts to proselytize for chenin blanc wines and biodynamic farming, going to the United States, where she and her husband had once lived, and across Europe, Asia and South Africa, where chenin blanc grapes are widely grown.
In 2017, she co-founded the Academie du Chenin, an organization that promoted research and interest in the grape, and two years later she organized the first Chenin Blanc International Congress, bringing together wine growers and makers from around the world to share best practices and ideas about improving the grape’s reputation.
She was serving another term as president of the Savennières appellation and was planning the next international congress, set for 2025, at her death.
A big part of Mrs. de Pontbriand’s appeal lay in the seeming contradiction between her traditional approach to the culture of wine and the very progressive ideas she brought to making it.
“Evelyn was this person who, in her manner, was very French of a certain generation, very formal in her way,” Jon Bonné, the author of “The New French Wine” (2023), said in an interview. “But in her intellect, in her vision for what not just Savennières but the Loire could be, she was incredibly radical.”
Evelyne Bazin de Jessey was born on Nov. 23, 1950, in Paris, but spent significant time in and around Angers, the closest city to the Savennières appellation, where her parents, Jacques and Michele (de Féligonde) de Jessey, owned and operated Domaine du Closel.
They did not raise her to go into the family business, but she picked up some things by a sort of osmosis. “Taste was always something I was into,” she said on the podcast “I’ll Drink to That!” in 2014.
“When they had guests, we couldn’t drink the wine,” she continued, referring to herself and her siblings. “But after, we would finish the glasses. So I knew what good wine was.”
She studied comparative literature at the Sorbonne and fine arts at the Ecole du Louvre, graduating in 1972.
In 1973, she married Mr. de Pontbriand and they moved to Philadelphia, where he attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked in an art gallery and taught French.
Later, they moved to Frankfurt, where she also taught French. They returned to Paris in 1985.
Along with Mr. de Pontbriand, she is survived by their daughters, Isauere and Gersende de Pontbriand; their sons, Romuald-Tristan and Aymeric; and six grandchildren. Whether any of them will follow her in leading Domaine du Closel is unclear.
Mrs. de Pontbriand did not consider herself a rebel, let alone a revolutionary. If anything, she saw her embrace of biodynamic winemaking as a return to the old ways of farming, and she denounced modern techniques as a break with tradition.
“It should be conventional wines that mention that they use chemicals on the labels,” she told the website for Louis/Dressner Selections, a wine importer, in 2011. “I find it strange that we’re the ones that should alert the consumer that our wines are ‘pure’ and ‘natural,’ and others don’t have to warn that they are ‘chemical’ or ‘poisonous.’”
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