Notre Dame Goes Back to Nature

From the Vineyard by N.O’ Phile, The Tablet’s Wine Writer

Amid the pomp, pride and palpable emotion of last week’s reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, an unremarked but far from insignificant vignette about the event has come The Tablet’s way. At the first Mass, celebrated fittingly on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception by the Archbishop of Paris, Laurent Ulrich, and at all Masses during the octave of the feast, the wine brought to the altar for consecration was produced by loyal readers of this column, Régis Anouil and his wife, Aude-Reine, at their micro-vineyard in the village of La Bénisson-Dieu, close to the city of Roanne, in the Loire département. 

Régis and Aude-Reine began making wine only in 2019, the fateful year when, on 15 April, fire engulfed the cathedral whose first stone was laid in 1163. Régis had previously been editor-in-chief of Eglises d’Asie; Aude-Reine had been the chancellor of the Diocese of Nanterre. But in the summer of 2017, they left their respective posts to join, along with eight other families, an “eco-hamlet”, a Catholic initiative inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato si’, aiming to live a simpler, more prayerful communal existence, closer to the rhythms of the natural world. 

Their wine, described on the label as Vin Méthode Naturel, is made without any of the technological aids common in modern winemaking: the fermented grape juice is neither fined nor filtered, and no preservatives such as sulphites are added. According to Régis, “We manage our vines using agroforestry and try to respect life in our soils as much as possible … without any of the inputs of modern oenology, our wines are genuinely natural.” 

That their wine was chosen is all the more remarkable, given that the largest donors to the £700 million cost of Notre-Dame’s restoration, the billionaires Bernard Arnault and François Pinault – two of the world’s richest men – own between them some of the world’s most famous vineyards, producing some of the world’s greatest and most expensive wines, such as Château d’Yquem, Cheval Blanc, Clos des Lambrays, Château Latour, Clos de Tart and many others. Though any of these distinguished wines would have been available for use at the Masses, the organic wines of the tiny Domaine de La Bénisson-Dieu, made by Régis and Aude-Reine, were chosen.

Significantly, the regulations concerning wine used at Mass merit precise prescription in canon law. The Code stipulates (924, §3) that the “wine must be natural, from the fruit of the vine and not spoiled”. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal adds that the “wine for the celebration of the Eucharist must be from the fruit of the vine, natural and unadulterated, that is, without admixture of extraneous substances” (§322). Fortified wines, for instance, are not allowed. Interestingly, it has been decreed that the addition of sulphites to avoid spoilage does not affect either liceity or validity. Wine that has begun to turn sour, however, is valid but illicit and, according to no less than St Thomas Aquinas, it would be not only unlawful but irreverent to use such wine (Summa theologiae, IIIa, q. 74, a. 5). On the other hand, wine that has already turned to vinegar is invalid matter – a not untypically subtle distinction on the part of the Doctor Angelicus.

Details about the wine and the eco-hamlet of La Bénisson-Dieu can be found at: domaine-labenissondieu.fr