Domain La Pensée Filante
Lou Chigard et Louis Lange
It is in Cernay, a few kilometres north of Tours, that Lou and Louis have found a cellar to house the 2020 vintage. Just in time for the harvest, after a year of nomadic winemaking. The young couple’s story begins in 2019, when a winegrower friend in the Loir et Cher region offers to vinify some of his grapes for the wine trade. Chenin and Chasselas grapes which produce their first natural sparkling wine and which confirm that they are on the right track…
Trained as a sophrologist, Lou gradually refocused on her passion for horses. She grew up in the vineyard and learned about it from her father Philippe Chigard. When she met Louis, a geomatics engineer in the process of changing careers at the Amboise wine school, the future became clear: their common interest in vines and wine naturally led them to dream of a domain of their own! In the winter of 2019, they took on the seasonal job of pruning the vineyard until they came across a parcel of Gamay, and then another of Chenin, in the wake of this. Everything accelerates: in January 2020, they begin the process of creating the estate. Between the paperwork and the upkeep of their new vineyard – which the two of them look after without missing a beat – their activity as animal traction service providers is developing. This activity now represents their main source of income and is fully integrated into their project to give more space to relationships and mutual aid in their profession. The idea is to find the right balance between the estate and the service, to be able to bounce back on something else in the “grape-free” years.
“Being winegrowers, but not only…”. They imagine their profession in a different, multi-dimensional way: a new, more versatile, social agriculture.
Very present in the vineyard and observant, for them nothing must be left to chance. They work the soil with their horses, for greater precision and less soil compaction. At harvest time, they smell each bunch and sort it together, even if it means selecting only a third of the plot – which they did the first year. The quality of the harvest must be optimal and the hygiene in the cellar irreproachable, in order to start with a high potential and maximise their chances. The vines are organically grown and maintained by hand.
They don’t count the hours of work anymore. For some, this sounds crazy. Others will put it down to youth. They simply define themselves as “out of the box”, living to the rhythm of the seasons. The story of Pensée Filante is only at its first pages, but the first vintage from their Gamay announces the colour: “Here, it’s fine”.
Laurie Wendenbaum
