Didier Dagueneau dead at 52

Didier Dagueneau, celebrated French winemaker and agent-provocateur whose sauvignon blanc-based wines were tours de force of viticultural skill, died yesterday when his ultralight aircraft crashed shortly after take-off.

I never met M. Dagueneau, but news of his death drove me back to a brief but memorable profile by British wine writer Andrew Jefford in his book, The New France (Mitchell Beazley, 2002). A lightly edited version of his piece reads as follows:

"My first meeting with Didier Dagueneau was in an underground cavern in St-Emilion. Vinexpo was happening and a greenish collection of France's avant-garde were showing their wines. Maybe it was chance or maybe somebody's mischievous sense of humor, but Dagueneau's tasting table had been positioned under an opening in the cave, and the sunlight was cascading down onto France's most physically messianic winemaker in a bacchic parody of the Annunciation. Dagueneau glared at the tasters, he poured samples with studied, curt swiftness, all questions were met with monosyllabic replies. He would rather, one felt, have been racing huskies in Finland (as he did for three months the following winter). So we tasted. His wines smelled not of sauvignon blanc, nor of gooseberries or asparagus or of micturating felines, but . . . of spring. Sipping the Buisson Renard was like standing beneath a waterfall: the flavors were clean, limpid, eerily palpable, a soft shock. The Silex was not the parody flintlock of popular myth; it was pure, soaring, sappy, rich, finishing with just a hint of stone after rain. I had not been expecting this calm and majestic retreat from the varietal. I learned something new."

"The wine world has lost a great vigneron and the world has lost one of the most original, charming and mischievous characters to ever grace a vineyard row,” said Joe Dressner, of New York City, his U.S. importer.