MARIE ROCHER

Pouillé, Loire Valley

Marie Rocher doesn’t come from a winemaking family, but she is decidedly connected to the tightknit community of France’s first wave of natural wine. Her late father, Jean-Paul Rocher, was a luminary in publishing, and promoted many early texts on natural wine, including those by the legendary Jules Chauvey, and was a regular on the salon circuit going back to the 1980s. Marie initially took on her father’s work following his passing, running his publishing business and entrenching herself in the scene just as Jean-Paul did. Her connection to natural wine, however, goes all the way back to the mid-1990s, when she worked harvest with Marcel Lapierre following her high school graduation.

By the mid-2010s, Marie’s deep connections through the Parisian publishing world and the continuation of her father’s work led her to fall in with many of the era’s most important producers, spending time with the Likes of Pascal Potaire of Les Capriades, Hervé Villemade, and Mikaël Bouges. Potaire in particular showed her the potential to make elegant and joyful sparkling wines in the Loire Valley. After toying with the idea of making wine for years, she finally decided to attend wine school and experimented with various forms of vinification. In 2018, she finally made the move from Paris to the Loire and began making wine in earnest under the tutelage of Didier Barrouiellet, formerly of the incomparable Clos Roche Blanche. She began purchasing organic grapes from the Cher Valley, and even vinified her first two vintages at the facility formerly occupied by CRB. 

Given his incredible history of osmosis from some of the natural wine world’s top names, it’s no surprise that Marie’s wines have a style and vitality that is easy to fall in love with. While she owns no vines, she works with local growers and only organic grapes. All four cuvées – a rose, white, red, and sparkling rosé pet-nat – are vinified naturally, with the only addition being 1 to 3 grams of SO2 before bottling. Although her story is one of a mid-career change, and has only been producing wines for a few years, we feels Marie’s wines are some of the most pure and characteristically consistent wines coming out of the Loire today.