Skurnik Unfiltered
No reservations required—listening to these conversations feels like you've been invited to pull up a chair and share a glass with some of the most remarkable dinner guests, giving you a level of access that was previously gatekept for those in the know.
Skurnik Unfiltered is a new podcast that curates deep conversations with some of the finest winemakers, distillers, and industry leaders about the world of wines, spirits and hospitality. The show is hosted by Harmon Skurnik, the president of Skurnik Wines & Spirits, a leading importer and distributor of the finest terroir-driven beverages crafted at a human scale.
Episodes are guest-hosted by sommeliers and experts in the subfields of wine, spirits, sake, and other categories.
Skurnik Unfiltered is recorded at Skurnik Wines & Spirits headquarters in the Flatiron District of New York City.
Skurnik Unfiltered
Quentin Paillard
"You know, Champagne has built itself, at least since the '60s, on blending grapes together. Growers, we play a different card. We try to express wine from a singular place. And when you just think about the experience of tasting the same varietal made from different terroir, that's when I think you understand that wine is truly special."
Champagne Pierre Paillard is one of the most exciting domaines in France, thanks to a fortunate marriage of pristine terroir and “bon sens paysan,” with a mix of innovative farming and old-school winemaking.
In this episode, Quentin Paillard credits the introduction of organically farmed and densely planted Pinot Fin massal selections, selective dosage, and vinifiying every cuvée under oak as the main factors behind the Bouzy estate’s rapid rise among the legendary growers in the Montagne de Reims.
Automatically generated transcripts often make mistakes. Find a corrected version here.
You know, Champagne has built itself, at least since the '60s, on blending grapes together. Growers, we play a different card. We try to express wine from a singular place. And when you just think about the experience of tasting the same varietal made from different terroir, that's when I think you understand that wine is truly special.
Harmon Skurnik:Hey, this is Harmon Skurnik, and welcome to another episode of Skurnik Unfiltered. I have with me David Hinkle, who is the Chief French Officer of Skurnik Wines & Spirits, who recently sat down with Quentin Paillard of Domaine Pierre Paillard. You had a nice conversation, didn't you?
David Hinkle:You know, that was really one of the fun talks I've had recently. It's a domaine that really is on the cutting edge of what's going on, particularly in terms of Pinot Noir in Champagne, based in Bouzy, Quentin and his brother Antoine have really taken things to a different level. We took them on and are so, so lucky to have them as part of our portfolio, about about a year ago now, and it's really been exciting and fun to dive into particularly Pinot Noir-based Champagnes from some of the most exciting terroirs in the Montagne. I think it's a really exciting episode that folks are gonna really enjoy hearing from Quentin talk about the family property and legacy.
Harmon Skurnik:I can't agree more, and I gotta say, it's one of the most exciting additions we've had in recent years. Fabulous wines from Bouzy. And why don't we just sit back and tune in and listen to the episode right now?
David Hinkle:I think I'm gonna re-listen to it. Thanks, Harmon. So happy to be here in New York, David Hinkle with Skurnik Wines with Quentin Paillard of Domaine Pierre Paillard in Bouzy. It's very exciting to be here to taste the wines with you the newest releases, and talk about the the history of the property, but also your history with your brother Antoine. And one thing that I'm always very passionate about is the transition of generations. And I think it's beautiful to have watched you and your brother taste the wines and hear the story. And if you could communicate a little bit about that transition, when it started, and where we are today.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, thanks, David. Well, it's been quite a journey. My grandfather Pierre really is the one that started to make wine under his own label. Bouzy is one of those villages in Champagne where, even if you drive through the village, you'll see maybe 15 brands who have their own press, which is quite unusual. You go to some villages in Champagne and you have, like, sometimes one or two producers, and the rest is just co-ops. But Bouzy has always been quite independent in mindset with growers making their own wine. And my family is one of the few families in Champagne who's been there for quite some time. We've had vineyards in Bouzy for more than 200 years, but it's only after the war in '46 that my grandfather left the co-ops, built a press, established himself into a winery that my brother and I are now, which, the place itself is fantastic. We have a deep cellar that's 17 meters deep where we can put more than 300,000 bottles for second fermentation there. And then my father, Benoit, took over the winery at an early age. His father passed away too soon. So basically, my father didn't really have a mentor to show and tell him what to do. So in French we say that you are just "autodidact," you know, you learn on the go. And my father —there was at a period of time when my mom helped him, but —he was pretty much alone working with the team at the winery back then, with the same amount of vineyards that we work now on our own, which is 11 hectares, so it's quite a bit of work. And my father did a really fantastic job. And my brother and I grew up at the winery, so we were very close to every part of the year, and we were always helping out our father, whether he was in a cellar or labeling wine. In France, you get long summer breaks at school, and we were doing some, we call it "palissage," you know, where we trail the vineyards and prepare them for the harvest. And when we were about, I don't know, 20? Early 20s? Of course we asked our father, if we were to come back, what would be the best time? And my father was very keen on not having us back too soon because he wanted, I think, us to have opportunities which he didn't have.
David Hinkle:Because he had to take over so quickly.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. So for example, myself, I actually worked in all the jobs outside of Champagne. I worked in restaurants, I worked in retail, I worked in wineries, and after working for a couple years outside of Champagne, then I knew it was time to come back. A little bit the same for my for my brother, we just did different experience. But we both went outside and then came back. We worked with our father for almost eight years until he he retired in 2018. It was a slow but very good transition.
David Hinkle:So from '10 to '18 you worked side -by -side, and that must have been a really gratifying thing for him and for the two of you.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, I mean, making wine is a very passionate job. There are things that you're very much attached to and some that you're less over time, or things that I think you want to release some pressure. For example, the vineyards, every year as a grower, the pressure is of the nature. Like, are you going to able to have a crop? And when are you going to harvest? And things like that. Making the wine actually is much less stressful because you are the owner of it. So I think my father was happy for us, and my brother especially, to take the lead in the vineyard at a very early stage.
David Hinkle:That's the first thing you really took on, was the vineyards.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, which made sense because you always hear, and it's the truth, that everything starts in the vineyard— with right things in the vineyard, of course. But if you have a better understanding of how it starts, it's easier to handle the wine in the cellar afterwards.
David Hinkle:But your father, I want to say he was ahead of his time in terms of how he worked the vineyards. He already prepared things for the organic future that you and your brother have taken on.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, that is true. Uh my father was in "culture raisonnée." We call it in French, "bon sens paysan."
David Hinkle:Good common sense of a farmer.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. Of course he was a different generation. The climate also was not what it is now. And one of the things that he did that made a lot of sense in the '80s is, he planted some clonal selections like a lot of the producers did in Champagne, but quickly realized that that was not the answer to produce top quality wine. So he had some older vines, which thankfully he didn't replace, and he said to himself, "Alright, those consistently when I taste the wine are significantly better than some other plantations. Is it better because of the terroir? Is it because of the age of the vine?" Things like that, you know. But you come to realize no, that those vineyards are very special.
David Hinkle:That's the heritage of the property.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, exactly. He could basically, instead of planning clonal selections again and again and again, he stopped very quickly and used those two single -vineyards that we've been making single cuvées since '07, the Maillerettes for the Pinot Noir and the Mottelettes for the Chardonnay. And they were basically his mother plot for all his replantation. So when we came back with my brother, we already had a vineyard that was mostly made of massal selections for my own family, which, outside of the idea of having something that's just from your family, it's also great in terms of diversity. So you have more different Pinot Noir which provides different taste. It, of course, has a great impact in terms of yields because also massal selections, basically Pinot Noir, can fit the palm of your hand, whereas most of the clonal selections yield fruit that's bigger than the size of your hand. And we're not making still red wine in Champagne. However, with Pinot Noir, there is a breaking point where if the yields are too high, you go into dilution, dilution of aromatics, and dilution of acidity.
David Hinkle:You make ponderous, heavy wines, essentially.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. We had great genetic material when I came back with my brother, and that was one of the things that we put our head on at the very beginning, was massal selections. We continued what my father had done, we pushed it even further, deeper for every harvest with my brother for like four years, starting '09. We spent like two days, three days in the vineyards with a pot of paint, just painting down every single foot of Les Maillerettes, for example. We put that plot on an Excel sheet, and we had it brought down to the number of the row, the number of the foot. And every year you select fruit that meets certain criteria: quality, quantities of the grapes, healthiness of the foliage, ability to sustain botritis if you have a pressure for botrythis, etc. So year after year, we were just pinning down those and identifying the fruit, so that we could multiply them. We just took it to another level, to where we're even more precise in the massal selections that my father had built. But then we quickly wanted to implement some other massal selections, which at the time, back early 2010, there weren't many available in Champagne. If there were, they weren't necessarily in good condition, sadly. So my brother did some digging around and researched and found out that there was this massal selection from Burgundy that was available called Pinot Fin, which is a massal selection that was created by the Grower Association of Burgundy, where they had hundreds of producers collectively pulling vine materials together and making it available to producers like us. Traditionally, Pinot Fin is what growers plant in like Premier Cru vineyards. They even have more qualitative massal selections called Pinot Tré Fin. But for us in Champagne, it doesn't really make sense. When you make sparkling wine, you want moderate yields, you don't necessarily want 20 hectoliters in the vineyard.
David Hinkle:You don't want them too concentrated, too low.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. So we started to plant those Pinot Fin. It was kind of a risk, a measured risk, because I think when you want to make the best wine possible, if you have very good quality fruit, the only risk was potentially having yields too low. But we accepted that.
David Hinkle:Because it's a financial decision, too.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. First off, we didn't replace all of our vineyards with Pinot Fin. Second, we have some reserve wines in Champagne, and then we just decided to produce less and make better wine— wine that has stronger identity. So those vineyards, you know, it takes six, seven years for the vine to build its root system, but those Pinot Fins are finally starting to show true balance between the fruit and the minerality that you get from the chalk. And it's really exciting. We've also increased some density of plantation in some of those vineyards to increase competition in between the plants. So not only do you reduce the yields, but you also push the vineyard's root system to go deeper into the chalk because it's basically fighting for the food at the top level of the soil in between the vine stocks. That's something that's officially legal now in Champagne since there was a law that also allowed for vignes semi-large. They allowed for producers to also increase density on the other side of the spectrum. So no growers can actually plant at a much higher density of plantation in Champagne than before.
David Hinkle:Can you explain? Because I think it's very interesting. The other advantages you get from the denser plantation and the selections in terms of the wines themselves, the taste of the wine.
Quentin Paillard:I like to think of it as Pinot Noir in high definition. Lower yields means better concentration, better aromatics, less dilution of the acidity. But on the other hand, you have to counterpower that actual concentration with great minerality. And in Champagne, that's really what makes the region so unique. Especially where we are in the Montagne de Reims and Bouzy, we have chalk that's been here for quite some time. And you really have to force the vineyards to seek for that chalk. And when you increase competition between the food, you encourage the root system to go deeper.
David Hinkle:So you feel like you get better minerality, and that helps balance the concentration.
Quentin Paillard:It brings salinity into the wines. It reduces the pH levels. It makes the wine's ageability much greater. We talk about like sapidity, salinity, mineral tensions, which, with the warmth and the climate being warmer, the total acidity in the wine has fallen in the last 10 years. We have less acidity every year. There is a stronger and stronger justice in viticulture. With the right viticulture now and the expression of the soil, you are still able to make fantastic Champagne. Even in really warm vintages, like we've had in '18, '19, '20, and '22. But that requires your vines and your soil to be alive, where the topsoil is not dead, and you have a root system that actually emphasizes the chalk. Bouzy has this reputation of producing wines that are very powerful and vinous, it's true. Because we have a richer clay soil that sometimes is very deep, there is always a strong fruit element in the wines of Bouzy. But with the right yields and the right vine selection, you can also emphasize the subsoil, the chalk. Which, even in the warm vintages, works as a buffer for the heat and makes the wine's salinity and drinkability really high.
David Hinkle:I want to talk because I think the next part of it is, and and you can correct me on the timing, your father stopped using herbicides in the vineyards a long time ago. He wasn't organic.
Quentin Paillard:No, he wasn't.
David Hinkle:But that still was a step that was very important for the family. And then you and your brother have taken that a step further within '24, the organic certification. Can you just talk a little bit about how that plays into everything else that you're doing, the overall philosophy of you and your brother?
Quentin Paillard:Well, growing organic is probably a very challenging thing everywhere in the world. Champagne, you're testing the very limit. Every three, four years, you eat a vintage like 2016, '21, '24, where you lose between 30 to 50 percent of your crop. No matter how well you're prepared, no matter how well you're equipped.
David Hinkle:Because how far north you are.
Quentin Paillard:How far north and the rain. When you spray every two or three days in very difficult vintages like '21, you lose crop, slowly but surely. And there are things you can do.
David Hinkle:Pinot Noir is more complicated too than Chardonnay.
Quentin Paillard:Pinot Noir is complicated too, but there are things that a producer can do sometimes, which is not what we're doing. For example, you can decide to start the beginning of the growing season with a high yield potential. So it means that even if you lose some crop, you'll end up with a level of crop that's still viable. It goes a little bit against our philosophy, and not all of our vineyards are like that, in the sense that, for example, we have some Chardonnay that sometimes we allow the yields to go a little bit higher than Pinot Noir because it allows that.
David Hinkle:Chardonnay likes likes higher yields.
Quentin Paillard:Or at least it tolerates it, whereas Pinot Noir is not forgiving on the yields. So you can do that if you if you grow organic, but for us, growing organic is not necessarily a decision for making the best possible wine; it's the decision for making a consensus decision on our health and the health of the earth and the health of the people that work with us. I think the herbicides are probably the greatest deal breaker between making okay wine and making terroir-driven wine. Because as soon as you use herbicides, especially in Bouzy, you're gonna make wine that emphasizes the clay and not the chalk, so you're gonna have a wine that's very fruit-driven and doesn't have any mineral element to it. And especially with the harvest happening closer to the end of August, where we have more luminosity, it means more sugar and sometimes less acidity because it's higher heat, herbicides leads to very bad wine, which often are driven by the yeast on the nose, on the palate. There is no fruit or mineral element to it. It's very empty wine.
David Hinkle:I think that that aspect of the organic side of things is something people don't think about. And I think, listening to you, it's the combination of the density, the massal selection, and the organics together that make the difference. And it's not like you just automatically start farming organically; you've got to think about the whole process.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. You're absolutely right. That's why we don't like to use shockers like, "okay, you grow organic, you make better wine." Absolutely not. You can have high -yield clonal selections, bad vine selections, and you grow organic, and you won't necessarily make good wine. You'll make better wines, but you will underutilize your potential of making some great wine, especially on great terroir.
David Hinkle:There's so many things I want to talk about. We've talked a lot about the vineyards. Can you talk a little bit about your vinification and how that ties into your philosophy of what you're trying to pull from the vineyards?
Quentin Paillard:Sure. So it took us some time, like younger generations, my brother included and I, we've experimented a lot with different kinds of vessels. We experimented towards reductions, toward oxidations. We experimented a lot. And I'm confident to say now that, especially with the lattest release, that we've hit the spot in terms of, that's what we want to achieve. My father's wines were mostly aged in stainless steel for his base wine, so they were working more in the reductive environment, where the lees are constantly in contact with the wine until the spring. Whereas my brother and I, we started to use oak barrels starting in 2010, very slowly but surely, starting with large-size wood, so the print on the wood would not be too significant. And now we have about 250 barrels at the winery. It took us 10 years to start this program. It's challenging, but it's very rewarding, especially for the first cuvée at the winery, called Les Parcelles, goes under oak, which for a winery our size, there are only a handful of wineries whose wines, including the base cuvée, the non-vintage cuvée, goes through the same vinification, the same precisions of winemaking as the top cuvées. The ability to put wine under oak, especially in a terroir like Bouzy, does a couple things. It tends to tame the fruit; some of the primary aromatics, some of the varietal aromatics that you get from the Pinot Noir just vanish during the first fermentation with the heat and the fermentation into the barrel. So you make a wine that's not just as fruit-driven as it would be if you did it in stainless steel. Then, of course, you play with the lees. The lees will create a reductive environment within the vessel, and at the same time, you have oxidation through the side and the top of the barrel. So that balance of oxidation and reduction creates more nuance into the wine, more depth. And then you also add an element of spice, which, when you grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir into calcareous soil, doesn't provide any spice element in general, at least in Champagne or in Bouzy. So, when you put wine on the barrels, you get all these aromatics from the wood as well. I think putting our wines in the barrels made our wines more expressive, more nuanced, with a very slight oxidative aromatic. However, the wines, I think, are very transparent about the terroir, where they're from, and the vintage, which is something for us that's very important.
David Hinkle:And even on the non-vintage wines, you do something unique, you give a wink to the base vintage on the front of the label, because that's an important part of the wine. I know you took a process since 2010 to come up with the type of wood you wanted, and you have a mix, but also I think it's very intelligent the way you integrate new wood because you want to be in control of the quality of what you're getting, so you get really high-quality wood. But also, people are going to wonder how much new wood and what do you do with it?
Quentin Paillard:We buy about five percent of new wood every year, and that new oak barrel often goes into the cuvées. The impact, at least aromatic impact, will be blending the best possible. So it goes into Les Parcelles.
David Hinkle:So, a larger cuvée.
Quentin Paillard:Exactly. It's quite smooth. You don't feel the excessive heat that sometimes you could get from a new toast barrel. However, with the warmth that we have, the concentration, the wine's pH, which —traditionally, wines with lower pH and great concentration can sustain barrels with even medium toast—whereas if we see it very easily in Champagne, if you put the taille, the second and third press of the same parcel, under new oak, they respond completely differently. They don't respond very well because they have a lot of fruit, but the pH level are sometimes higher and they don't have the ability to sustain a lot of heat from the barrels. But top cuvée s, they do very well. We've learned and we've increased the heat over time, not necessarily to seek for more toast, but to increase durability. Because if you have a very neutral barrel in year one, after three, four years it becomes like a vessel, and you also have to think of it like, okay, those are made from 150—200 -year -old trees. And if your barrel is not providing any more spice elements, for example, after three, four years, I think you're missing out. I think you also have to consider longevity and the ability to vinify wine for a long time.
David Hinkle:Maybe you could talk a little bit about your philosophy on dosage, because a lot of people think about that, and I'm curious your philosophy overall.
Quentin Paillard:I think nowadays dosage is a counterpower to great viticulture and the austerity that sometimes you get in the wines that are made onto chalk. Whereas in the past, dosage might have been more useful to counterpower really high acidity, and not necessarily a lack of maturity, but just a much higher acidity because the harvests were at the end of September. And at that time of year, you don't degrade malic acid and tartar acid like you do when harvests are happening in August. So, in terms of balance, dosage was not necessary, but it will make the wine a lot softer, more pleasant to drink. Whereas now, even if we have great maturities, very low pH, we have moderate acidity in warm vintages. But the dosage plays a role in terms of mouthfeel and the finishes of your wine. When you add dosage, it breaks that austerity that sometimes you get in the wines of Champagne that are very racy and sharp, even those that are made from ripe fruit; it makes the wine more versatile. So even one or two grams helps to drink the wine at the table and is more pleasant, gives you more emotion.
David Hinkle:And that's where you are, typically?
Quentin Paillard:Yeah, one, two, sometimes three grams. A warmer vintage like 2020, for instance, might actually need a higher dosage than a vintage like 2019. When you have a vintage with a lot of heat and dryness in the vineyards—sometimes even if you harvest at a very high level of ripeness level, so you're sure that your maturities is not just done by concentration and decrease of water—you sometimes have fruit that's not actually complete. And the dosage actually helps to finish that, even if it's three or four grams. So warmer vintages doesn't necessarily lead to lower dosage.
David Hinkle:The last thing, because we're unfortunately running out of time, can you talk a little bit— because I know that you and your brother have talked a lot, at least I've heard in the last six months or so—that this moment is kind of the culmination of some of the transition from 2010 to today. And I'd like for you to explain what you mean when you say that, and you're talking to your brother about what you're feeling at the moment.
Quentin Paillard:We're super proud. My brother and I worked really, really hard. You know, Champagne is a game of time. My father gave us the ability to take over the winery and take everything, to the next level because we were two, first and foremost; my dad was alone. And then everything we've done in the vineyards, I think, is starting to show. Reducing the yields, implementing, some other massal from our family, vinification under oak. Starting 2018, all of our wines are vinified under barrels. So now we are on the '19s together, for example, right now. The vinification style is mature, and our visions also have changed since 2018. We started to venture outside of Bouzy, which my family's never done before that, and we actually learned a lot by doing so. We started with Ludes Meunier on the northern part of the Montaigne de Reims and Verzenay, some Pinot Noir also in the north. And it was a fantastic project. We have in front of us a bottle of Verzenay, which is truly, truly not only a very pretty village with slight rolling hills that shows the northeast, the north, and the northwest—there's great diversity of exposition in the terroir—but with the warmer vintages that we've had, it's significantly higher acid than let's say Bouzy or Ambonnay. It doesn't mean we're making more fatty wines, it just means that it gives you another card to harvest maybe a little later and produce wines that are different in style than what we've been accustomed to historically with my family in Bouzy.
David Hinkle:I think the last thing to tie it together is, I think the beautiful thing that you and Antoine have done with these projects in these other villages. It's all done with the same philosophy. You're going after massal selection. You're basically replicating by working with a like-minded farmer to buy some grapes, harvest them in the same way, with the same philosophy, to just build, as you said, a little bit larger palette of things to play with, which I'm sure helps you with your home wines in Bouzy.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah. And in three years, that project that we started in 2018 will be complete because we will have wine from Ambonnay, Verzy, and Verzenay, and of course, Bouzy. So you have the four best Pinot Noirs of the Montagne de Reims vinified in the same way and with the same agenda, looking at the best possible plot, old vines, so massal, grown without herbicides, of course, so there is a sense of place. It's very exciting. It's it provides an experience —for ourselves and for the people who drink the wines of Champagne —that's very educational because nobody knows really about those terroirs. Of course, you have singular producers like Egly-Ouriet and Ambonnay, who put their village on the map for the right reason. But when you look at Verzy and Verzenay, it's only been, what, 10 years that you're starting to see more and more producers from those areas. I mean, of course, there was two, three producers that they were making wine there already and fantastic wines, but to give a village and put it on the map, you need multiple producers to provide wine from those villages, and they are truly different. You know, Champagne has built itself, at least since the '60s, on blending grapes together, whereas I think growers, we play a different card, we try to explain wine from a singular place. And for us, the ability to vinify each of those places with the same attention, we harvest the fruit ourselves, we vinify everything at the winery and we press it with our own press, which is fundamental when you make sparkling wine. It provides an amazing, amazing tasting experience. I think it's a little bit from the experiences that my brother and I had in Burgundy when we were in our early 20s. You will go to some wineries and you will have the ability to taste village side by side, you know, from the Côte de Nuit. And of course, the soil and the geology and the history in Burgundy is different. But when you just think about the experience of tasting the same varietal made from different terroir, that's when I think you understand that wine is truly special. And we're like, let's do it in Champagne!
David Hinkle:That's the dream. And you know what you told me yesterday, and I'll maybe finish there, is that you and your brother, because of this experience and this adventure that the two of you are taking, you've got all kinds of people coming to you with opportunities from places that you can't even —well, you don't want to accept all of them. But there's a palette and an opportunity in Champagne for that type of experience and adventure that there really isn't in a lot of other places, which is surprising considering the history.
Quentin Paillard:Yeah. There are a lot of hidden treasures.
David Hinkle:So stay tuned because Pierre Paillard and Quentin and Antoine have lots of fun things for us in the future. A real treat to talk today. Thank you. Cheers.
Harmon Skurnik:Which is why you might hear some city noises as we go along, like horns honking. If you found the conversation interesting, please consider liking, subscribing, and leaving a review. You can stay up to date on our show and upcoming events by following Skrnick Wines on Instagram and visiting our website at skrnick.com.
