Talk with Marie Yuki Méon 

MARIE YUKI MÉON

My mother used to work in the haute couture industry for prominent ladies in Tokyo. During my childhood, I would move around this private parlour where, like in olden times, female clients would take their time trying on prototypes for hours, eating pastries and chatting. I was truly influenced by this bespoke approach, spending time creating a concept, observing who you are making things for, and who your creations are designed for.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

Yes, and that’s how for a decade or so I became an interior designer for fashion. I discovered a stage – the world of luxury – team work and the conventions of the top fashion houses. It is very character-building. And then surreptitiously a desire for craftsmanship, to do something by myself crept up on me. Cooking had become an obvious choice. I had it in me. I knew that I didn’t want to have a restaurant. I wanted to cook but I didn’t yet know in what way.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

Because my parents didn’t have much time, I grew up spending my time watching cookery programmes on television. There have been cookery reality shows in Japan for 30 years. I used to love them. And then, I lost my mother when I was young and I would spend time with my father, often cooking with him, in some ways to cope with this loss. Cooking has a kind of remedial quality that helps you envisage the future. Feeding someone is akin to filling them with love and that crystallised something very strong inside me.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

I discovered wine twenty years ago at the Verre Volé, a Parisian bistro that pioneered the discovery of natural wines. Natural wine was a real eye-opener for me. With a red Loire wine, probably a Gamay, I had an immediate rapport with a sensual and organic emotion through wine. This was something totally new to me, for whom everything transits via intellect. When I drank my first Loire wine, it felt like I was drinking loam, in the noblest sense of the word. It was like a bridge between the hand of the winegrower and the earth being brought to me in a glass. I suddenly became aware of a raw emotion. After that, you open a door and discover there is a lot more room, and many things that can happen from a taste perspective and emotionally. It was very inspiring for my cooking. So much so that when I began to prepare food at home, we would host ‘underground dinners’ with three chefs and would only serve natural wines. At the time it was quite daring and fairly unsettling for people. My playground therefore got so much bigger. There were a lot of Loire and Burgundy wines, mostly Pinot noir, Gamay and Grolleau – wines with light tannins designed to highlight fruitiness on the palate. My knowledge of grape varieties began then, primarily by discovering Chenin from Domaine la Paonnerie (2015 Champs Jumeaux), which made me want to delve deeper into the variety of vineyard sites.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

The chef Alain Passard says, “If you combine foods of the same colour and the same season, you will never go wrong”. That pillar of thought stays with me, and it works! With the relationship between food and wine, in some ways it’s the same thing. If for example a wine is fermented in amphorae and I am cooking something in a crust, it will work by recalling the taste of the earth. So, being familiar with the history of a wine, how it is made etc can provide some clues for the ideal pairing, even before you try it.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

I was very inspired by things an artist like Laila Gohar produces. She creates an artistic stage for cooking like you’ve never seen before and more importantly, she doesn’t set any boundaries for creating culinary art. In the world of French gastronomy, cooking gets bogged down by years of heritage and tradition, with its sacrosanct heritage iterations, the burden of rules and pigeonholes. When I met Laila and saw her work, I felt that we were free to break with those conventions too.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

I am searching for a vibration, I’m looking for something good I ate when I was a child in Japan, something that can be accessible to everyone. It’s about making people aware of the moment through my cooking. There’s something wonderfully nostalgic about thinking about what you’re eating as you’re eating it. There is a common thread and symbolic significance to everything I do. Nothing is left to chance. I tell myself stories that prompt me to cook. I think about the context of cooking, the way you serve a meal – the taste counts as much as the way we’re going to eat it. For instance, I am very influenced by offerings. At my grandparents’, there is always an altar, a bowl of rice every day, fermented vegetables and a piece of seasonal fruit to be a part of the present with the living and the dead. The fruits of the earth connect the living with the afterlife. And that’s exactly what wine does too.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

Harold, my photographer partner, and myself compared our relationship with time with the ancient faded beauty of the city. The prevalence of water put us into a very organic relationship with things, just like the banks of the Loire which I love. It was very inspiring. So much so that we took part in a unique experience called ‘Laguna nel bicchiere – le vigne ritrovate’. It is a purely Venetian association which rehabilitates former vineyards that have been abandoned in Venice. The idea is to make wine again, like in the past, with no inputs, natural fermentation and grapes picked by hand. The winery is on San Michele island which is also the cemetery island of Venice. It is a time of rest for the living and the dead! The wines are extraordinary – all of them are blends, both the reds and the whites, which are not commercially available. You have to be a member of the association and donate your time to it, to be able to get 2 bottles per person at most. I feel very lucky to share this with the Venetians.

MARIE YUKI MÉON

I have incredible emotions with wine, and I have to say particularly with wines by female winegrowers because I get excited about all the stories behind these wines. One example is the ‘Gisèle’ label by Closerie des Moussis in Haut-Médoc, a blend of Sauvignon gris and Muscadelle. I found the energy, the vitality and yet the gentleness of this wine particularly moving. It is made by two women in the Bordeaux region, on the border between the great classics and a new world of wines, the type that does not use chemicals.

There are also the wines by Muriel Zoldan at Domaine Antocyame, near Montauban, which really shake me up because they have incredible energy even though they are made from fairly robust southern varieties like Tannat. What goes on with her is almost musical, there’s a kind of vibe that energises her wines.

Wines mirror the beautiful people I am drawn to, like those by Ariane Lesné in Loir et Cher, or Margot Rousseau-Petit and Natalia Santo in Anjou with their Loire Grolleau noir label ‘Ismaël’, that’s my life mantra.

My greatest discovery this year though is the Japanese winegrower Yoko Ogawa at Mas du Dragon des Pierres in Tautavel. It’s a rosé pét-nat, ‘Pink is not Rosé’, a blend of Macabeu, Grenache gris, Syrah and Grenache noir, showing incredible ethereal finesse. Yoko decided to make wine to retrieve the time she lacked and spend it with her friends. Making wine is about creating memories together, she says. This speaks volumes to me.

Lastly, with Margot Carroget and chatting to her now retired father, Jacques Carroget at Domaine La Paonnerie, I fully understood the nobility in Loire wines. The wine we are making together this year, a whole-cluster fermentation of Melon de Bourgogne, is a story of close friendship, two worlds meeting. I help at the winery to keep a foot in the ground. As my work is very short-lived, it helps me see things from a more long-term perspective.