Picture This: Domaine Henri Gouges 1945 – 2016

 BY NEAL MARTIN | OCTOBER 16, 2018

Photographs so often convey history better than words. They can stimulate our imagination and trigger emotions. A photograph presents minimal information, its temporal limitation governed by the click of the lens that ensnares a moment in time. Our minds are left to colour in what comes before and after. 

This article was virtually finished. My finger hovered over the “SEND” button when I remembered a friend, married to the Gouges family, once mentioned that his wife’s grandmother was celebrating her 100th birthday that coming weekend. Having just researched various family members, I was intrigued by how she might be related to the Gouges family and assumed that realistically, she may no longer be with us. Thirty minutes later, Aurelia Haynes-Gouges replies with a photograph of 104-year old Paulette Gouges, daughter-in-law of Henri Gouges, who at that precise moment is enjoying lunch with a bottle of 1991 Hermitage La Chapelle and a bottle of 2004 La Mission Haut-Brion, just in case she is still thirsty. Looking at this wonderful photograph, I contemplated the passage of time. Mme Gouges witnessed nearly everything I wrote about the Domaine, the most venerable wines in this article born in 1945 and 1949, when she would have been in her thirties. It changed the entire perspective of the article. I scrapped the draft and rewrote the piece as Aurelia kindly passed on more information about the Gouges family.

This article looks at the past and present of Domaine Henri Gouges, both in terms of content and attendant reviews spanning eight decades. Nothing I can write is as evocative as these black and white photos, but I will do my best. The article provides insight into one of the most important growers in Burgundy, with over 60 reviews from simple Bourgogne Rouge to postwar gems. As an added bonus to Vinous readers, free of charge, I will also reveal the key to living a long life. So let us start in the obvious place. The beginning.

Henri Gouges circa 1948 with glass and bottle in hand at the winery doors. This poignant image captures his personality more than words. Photograph courtesy of the Gouges family.

History

The Gouges lineage within that ambit of Nuits Saint-Georges extends back to the 1600s. At the turn of the 20th century, Henri-Joseph Gouges worked both as a vineyard manager for négoçiants and as a pépiniériste, a nursery where he sold cuttings to be grafted onto American rootstock to save vines threatened by phylloxera. Interestingly, according to Clive Coates MW, Henri-Joseph Gouges married a Grivot, so there is a distant family connection between the two dynasties. Gouges’eldest son, Henri, was born in 1899. Henri Gouges served four years of military duty including time in the Dardanelles and returned to Nuits Saint-Georges in 1919. According to Coates writing in his “Côte d’Or” tome, the twenty-year old Henri presented his father an ultimatum: to transfer the vineyard holdings into his name or he would return to the army. However, Gouges’ his eldest grandson, Pierre, cannot recall any mention of this. Whatever happened, the following year the namesake Domaine was established and Henri Gouges expanded the holdings in a period when land was virtually being given away. Parcels included Les Pruliers in 1920, Les Saint-Georges in 1921 and a monopole of Clos-des-Porrets in 1934.

Henri Gouges was by all accounts a formidable man who bestrode the appellation, indeed, the region as a whole. His nickname was “le gendarme de la Bourgogne”, not only because of his activities dealing with the AOC but also because the house in Nuits Saint-Georges, the same that stands today, used to be the town’s police station. “He had a very strong character,” Aurelia Haynes-Gouges explains. “He could be seen as autocratic, but it was mostly a reflection of his passion and determination. As you know, very early on, he understood that one needed to give confidence to consumers again by guaranteeing the origin of the product and that could only happen through strict regulations. So he needed to be tough.” Indeed. Incensed by the imbalance of power between négoçiants and growers, Gouges resolved to break the stranglehold that merchants had enjoyed since time immemorial. Together with the Leroy, Rousseau and d’Angerville families, he took the provocative step of bottling his own wine instead of contracting his fruit to merchants and letting them reap the profits. The first vintage bearing his own name was the 1924. From 1928 the labels were stamped “Authenticité garantie”, a poke in the eye for unscrupulous négoçiants passing off cheaper wine, not necessarily from Burgundy, as Premier or Grand Crus. Timing was fortuitous. With American Prohibition rescinded, Gouges suddenly had a new market to exploit and of course, now he could sell directly via his importer, the influential Frank Schoonmaker. The likes of Gouges ultimately led to the formation of AOC rules in 1936. Although the pepping up of Burgundy did not necessarily cease, at least it was now illegal.

This image captures a glimpse of the side of Henri Gouges perhaps less known, a family man casually dressed outside the winery with his wife around 1948. The child is Pierre Gouges. Pierre can be seen standing on a barrel. Photograph courtesy of the Gouges family.

As with all people, there was another side to Henri Gouges. He was an epicure, whose dining room hosted hoteliers and restaurateurs for long weekend dinners. Clive Coates wrote an amusing anecdote about a pike and a bathtub that I had to investigate further. “The other side of Henri was that he was a bon-vivant, a real patriarch and gastronome,” Aurelia explains. “He loved gathering friends and family and doing the cooking himself when he became a widower. He was friends with all the great Parisian chefs and often spent time at Taillevent, Chez George and all the famous restaurants of the time in the 1940s and 1950s, except for during the war. Of course, he was in Paris regularly for AOC meetings. The story about him keeping pike in the bathtub is true. There was no sea fish and so all fish came from local ponds or the Saone River. The problem was that the meat was not good if it contained lots of mud so you had to let them “dégorger” in clear water for a few days until they didn’t taste of mud anymore. We still have that bath and it still looks super clean.”

Gouges had two sons, Marcel and Michel, though neither ran the Domaine when their father was alive. I asked Aurelia to what extent Henri Gouges maintained control of the Domaine and how autocratic he really was. She pointed out that every generation has worked alongside the older generation for a number years.  The running of the Domaine at that time was more a “shared responsibility” rather than one person maintaining an iron rod of control. It was and still is, a crucial way of passing down savoir-faire.