Evelyne de Pontbriand, Champion of Biodynamic Winemaking, Dies at 73

Evelyne de Pontbriand, a former French teacher who had no formal experience in winemaking when she took over her family’s winery in the Loire Valley, but who nevertheless made it a leading example of organic viniculture and herself an internationally renowned voice for sustainable farming, died on Nov. 5 in Angers, France. She was 73.

Her husband, Gaël de Pontbriand, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was cancer.

Mrs. de Pontbriand was not looking for a career in wine in 2001, when her mother, Michèle Bazin de Jessey, retired from managing Domaine du Closel and its vineyard, Château des Vaults, and asked her to take over. At the time, Mrs. de Pontbriand lived in Paris, where she worked for a nonprofit helping people who had long been unemployed.

Still, she could hardly say no: Women had run Domaine du Closel for generations, producing well-regarded Savennières wines, made with chenin blanc grapes.

But if the family’s wines were respected, they were also considered a bit stuffy, and the Savennières appellation — an area of about 8.1 square miles — rarely ranked among France’s most exciting.

Mrs. de Pontbriand did much to change that. She began pushing Domaine du Closel to embrace biodynamic farming practices — eliminating chemicals, allowing grass to grow as ground cover and relying on ambient yeast to ferment the grapes. Such practices elevated the quality of the grapes, especially their ability to reflect the terroir, or particular soil and climatic characteristics, of where they were grown.