feature / face to face / Richard Geoffroy
RICHARD GEOFFROY: METAMORPHOSIS
After 28 years as chef de cave at Dom Pérignon, Richard Geoffroy set himself a new challenge. Margaret Rand talks to the new kid on the (sake) block
U
ntil 2018, Richard Geoffroy was Dom Pérignon made flesh. As chef de cave, he identified with the brand completely: “I can’t draw a line between what is DP and what is not,” he said once of his closeness to it. “It’s that intimate.” In addition,
he believed that to experience DP fully, to understand it, one also needed to experience all the vintages that were made but not declared—which meant, effectively, that only he could understand it. It’s a brand of Champagne, but it sometimes felt as if it was being elevated to a sort of vinous Eleusinian Mystery, way above the heads of you and me. Then, one day, Geoffroy left and went off to make sake. How was that? “Surprisingly easy,” he says. “In all honesty, it wasn’t difficult at all.” Oh, go on. No, he says; he just switched from one project to another. “Probably because I had had so much anticipation of the new project, I was ready for it. I had to be very dedicated, so focused that there was no room for anything else. “I had to move on. It was fantastic at DP, so powerful, but I was there for 28 years. There was a danger of settling into a comfort zone. I instinctively knew I had to move on. My way of managing, of keeping aging gracefully, is to set myself new challenges with new people, with all respect for the past; it’s very personal, very intimate—voilà. I’m not looking back.” It will prove, in this piece, as difficult to separate Geoffroy
from IWA (his sake) as it was to separate him from DP. The interesting thing about interviewing Geoffroy now and interviewing him then is that he has not changed one iota. Why would he, you might ask. He’s no longer part of corporate life in the same way, but he still does consultancy work, and by now two (and possibly all three) of his sons are involved in the (separate) consultancy business. He still has the same air of permanent exhaustion, and he still slumps in his chair in a way that makes Putin look upright. The introspective meditations about DP are now introspective meditations about IWA. The main difference, probably, is that now he flies in economy class. “Now is the best period of my life ever. There is a sense of entrepreneurship that is so personal. I am putting everything in this project, and more; I’m putting everything on the table. I feel so fit, it’s as simple as that.” Why sake? Because Geoffroy fell in love with Japan. “DP
led me to Japan—and I can’t thank them enough for that—and Japan led me to sake.” It was aesthetics that attracted him: “In Japan, aesthetics are everywhere, as much in the products as in the people themselves, the way they behave collectively— the global considerations of aesthetics. There is a way of working that is so minimal.” In particular, he says, he was drawn to a place at the base of one of the sacred mountains of Japan.
110 | THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023
His love of sake started slowly, and gradually he got more and more hooked. Eventually, “I thought I would make something, contribute to something, without breaking the essence.” He discovered sake in 2000, and in about 2015 he started seriously considering a project. But sake, he says, has been in decline roughly since the financial crisis of 2008. Younger people turned to beer, and sake became a bit middle-aged, a bit of a mum-and-dad drink. While he is certainly a winemaker, Geoffroy is also—and perhaps even more—a blender. “Give me water, and I’m pretty sure I’ll start blending water,” he says. “I blend my orange juice at breakfast.” What he wanted from sake was something that sake is not: Traditionally, it’s all about the nose, and it’s short on the finish. But he wanted flavor as well as nose… and length and balance and complexity. “Balance is a magical thing. It must be seamless, as in Champagne. I had to reset the traditional balance. I wanted the phenolics as low as possible, something gliding, an element of sour, bitter, sapid, saline. Whenever people dislike sake, it’s because of the aftertaste. It can be abrupt, with bitterness and the heat of alcohol; disharmonious. It can be, frankly, rather brutal. Some [examples] are not that brutal but fade away.” Geoffroy’s vision was not to diminish the nose, but to increase the palate and finish; change the texture, change the balance. Balance equals weightlessness. “It’s actually very Japanese, making something that is weightless but intense, or colorless yet intense. It’s paradoxical.” So, Geoffroy wanted to go to Japan, a place usually regarded as somewhat conservative in its ways, and make sake in a way that nobody ever had before. Time for a brief recap of how he got to this point.
Renewal and the quest for perfection Geoffroy comes from a Champagne-growing family but felt a life in the family firm was too predestined, so he went off to study medicine. Gradually, though, he realized that medicine was not what he wanted to do, so he switched to enology, and then went to California, where he worked at Domaine Chandon. Moët then offered him a job as technical advisor in Champagne, which in turn took him to DP. He started working for Dominique Foulon, then chef de cave, in 1990, and took over from him in 1996. Now, he says, he has been able “to peel things off, be leaner;
I like it. It’s easier; it’s to the point. You have to lose your ballast. It’s important to throw things off, be more experienced, take more risk, scrub a bit, get back to the core. DP is universal in
Right: Richard Geoffroy at IWA: “I’m taking risks. When you experiment, you take risks. I want to be experimental forever, continually experimental.”
Photography courtesy of IWA Sake
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