A Town of Rare Vintage

His restaurant/wine bar in Saint-Emilion, L'Envers du Decor ("the other side of the picture"), is a popular hangout among winemakers, wine lovers, locals and bobos (the made-in-U.S.A. term for "bourgeois Bohemian" that's caught on big in France).

As des Ligneris enters this room at the chateau, he wears the serene, playful expression of a yogi, which never seems to leave his face. For the next 45 minutes he launches into a performance piece in French, using the props to illustrate his noninterventionist winemaking philosophy, whereby each vintage is a product of that year's "earth and sky." In his vineyard, des Ligneris follows a natural, near-organic discipline, and in his winery he shuns the use of yeasts, filtration and fruit-extraction techniques. Bucking what has become modern conventional thinking in Bordeaux, he ages his wine with a minimum of new (and hence strong-flavored) wood casks.

At the end of his performance, des Ligneris picks up a strainer filled with more props and announces, "These things illustrate the wines I do not make."

He pulls out a small builder's level.

"I don't make perfect wines," he says. "I don't make uniform wines . . . "

Then out come more props to finish the point: a file, a folding ruler, a little pink dog collar.

In someone else's hands, the whole thing might be bombast or shtick, but des Ligneris's quiet charisma makes the whole thing work somehow. He cares deeply about the future of wine and Saint-Emilion. Funny, I left there caring, too.

St. Emilion Details, P9.

Robert V. Camuto last wrote for Travel on Italy's Puglia region.