Behind Another Door at Marouatte: The Old Wine Room

 Behind Another Door at Marouatte: The Old Wine Room

Photos later… and you all wanna come back and see them

One of the great pleasures of staying at Château Marouatte has been discovering that the château does not reveal itself all at once. There is always another doorway, another staircase, another building that makes me wonder, What is in there?

This afternoon, my curiosity took me across the courtyard to one of the old outbuildings.

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From outside, it is an wonderfully unassuming agricultural building: pale Périgord stone, a long red-tiled roof and a great dark doorway opening directly onto the courtyard. It belongs to the collection of communs, or service and agricultural buildings, inside Marouatte’s outer enclosure. Historical descriptions of the château specifically place the communs on this first terrace, separate from the more fortified residential château beyond the moat. 

I knew this as the old wine room.

I was not prepared for what I found inside.

Evidence of the Château’s Wine-Making Past

The moment I stepped through the door, the agricultural history of the building became tangible.

There were barrels everywhere.

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These are not decorative wine barrels brought in to make an old building look atmospheric. They are old working vessels, and some are enormous.

Several large horizontal wooden casks remain lined up along the stone walls. Others are stored on heavy timber racks, one above another. Their hoops are oxidized, the oak has darkened and dried, and some still have their old wooden or metal fittings.

Standing beside them gives an entirely different impression than looking at a modern wine barrel in a tasting room. These were pieces of equipment.

And they are big.

Some of the vessels appear considerably larger than the familiar approximately 225-litre Bordeaux barrique. From photographs alone I cannot responsibly assign exact capacities, but these larger casks belong to the broader tradition of substantial cellar vessels used for storing and maturing quantities of wine rather than simply moving individual barrels around.

The most impressive survivors, however, are standing upright.

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Against the walls are immense vertical wooden vats, constructed from thick staves and bound by multiple iron hoops. One rises nearly to the heavy timbers above it.

These are much more consistent with old cuves or large winery vats than ordinary transport barrels. A traditional winery needed different vessels for different jobs. Grapes arrived at harvest, were crushed or pressed depending upon the wine being produced, fermentation took place in vats, and wine could then be transferred to other vessels for settling, storage and maturation.

The scale tells me something important.

Whatever wine operation once took place here, this was not somebody making a few bottles for the dinner table.

There was infrastructure.

The building itself was part of the equipment

I began looking beyond the barrels.

The room is built of thick stone. The openings are small. Light is limited. Heavy timber beams support the roof.

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That architecture would have been useful in a wine cellar. Massive masonry moderates rapid temperature changes, while relatively little direct sunlight protects the wine from heat and light. Long before thermostatically controlled stainless-steel wineries, the building itself helped provide the stable environment the winemaker needed.

And then there are the old mechanical remnants.

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Beside one of the giant vats is a wonderful piece of old wooden and metal equipment, with a long lever and screw mechanism. I cannot identify its exact original configuration from the photograph alone, and parts may be missing or displaced, but it is clearly part of the room’s former working life rather than a modern decoration.

The entire space feels wonderfully honest because nobody has tried to make it into a museum.

The barrels have not been polished.

The walls have not been prettied up.

The floor remains rough.

It simply stopped being a winery.

And then something completely different moved in.

A Wine Room Full of Tiles

I walked farther inside and suddenly realized that I was surrounded by another collection altogether.

Tiles.

Hundreds and hundreds of them.

Perhaps more.

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They are stacked on shelves, piled on tables, wrapped in bubble wrap, leaning against walls and organized into groups. Some stacks contain many examples of the same pattern. Others appear to be individual survivors.

At first glance it looks almost chaotic.

Then I started looking closely.

It isn’t.

This is a collection.

An Architectural Pattern Library

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This photograph may be my favorite for understanding what is here.

On one shelf alone I can see narrow border tiles in greens, turquoise, cream, ochre, brown and blue. Some are flat and geometrically decorated. Others are molded in relief, with leaves, flowers, scrolls and repeating architectural ornament.

Below them are stacks of square tiles with repeating dark scroll patterns. On another shelf are narrow pieces that clearly could have been assembled continuously, one beside another, to form a decorative band.

These weren’t necessarily intended to be viewed as isolated little pictures.

Many were components of larger designs.

A border tile repeated twenty times becomes a frieze. Four corner tiles can complete a geometric figure. Repeated field tiles can cover a wall or floor. Molded pieces can create architectural lines around doors, fireplaces or wall panels.

That is why finding multiples matters.

The French ceramic industry became particularly important architecturally during the nineteenth century. Government heritage records document factories producing polychrome and architectural ceramics on an industrial scale. Perrusson, for example, added polychrome tile production to its works in 1875, while the Genevière and Bonniot works in Saintes produced tiles, paving and molded decorative ceramics in the late nineteenth century. 

I am not saying that the Marouatte tiles were manufactured by either company. Without examining makers’ marks on their backs, that would be speculation. But they belong visually to that extraordinary European tradition of architectural ceramics.

And the variety here is remarkable.

From Renaissance Revival to Art Nouveau

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There are strong geometric designs.

There are stylized flowers.

There are scrolling vines.

There are classical-looking borders.

There are deep turquoise and green glazed reliefs whose sinuous vegetation immediately suggests the decorative vocabulary associated with the late nineteenth century and Art Nouveau.

That progression actually fits the history of French tile manufacture remarkably well. The historic Paul Charnoz works, founded at Paray-le-Monial in 1877, developed colored ceramic tiles using patterns built into the material itself. French heritage documentation notes that its designs evolved from nineteenth-century eclecticism toward the more flowing decorative language that anticipated Art Nouveau around 1900. 

Elsewhere in the collection I see motifs that seem older in inspiration: Gothic, Renaissance, Moorish or medieval revival designs.

That does not necessarily mean the tiles themselves are medieval.

The nineteenth century adored historicism. Manufacturers freely borrowed Gothic arches, Renaissance foliage, Islamic geometry, medieval heraldry and classical ornament and reinterpreted them for Victorian-era houses, villas and public buildings. One extraordinary French ceramic mosaic produced for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, for example, deliberately used a neo-Renaissance composition recalling sixteenth-century decoration. 

So this collection may span different dates, manufacturers and countries, while simultaneously containing designs inspired by periods centuries apart.

Determining them individually would require turning them over.

That is where the real detective work would begin.

Salvaged Architecture

There is another fascinating historical precedent for what I am seeing here.

Decorative tiles often survive because somebody saves them when a building is altered or demolished.

A French museum collection contains an elaborate tiled bathroom created in 1876 by ceramicist Théodore Deck from designs by Edmond Lachenal. The tiles survived specifically because they were recovered from a villa scheduled for demolition in the 1970s. 

Looking at the stacks at Marouatte, I couldn’t help wondering how many similar stories are represented here.

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Some are chipped.

Some retain old mortar.

Some have darkened edges.

Some are wrapped carefully.

Others are piled together as working material.

They do not look like boxes of new tiles ordered from a supplier. At least a substantial portion appear to be architectural salvage.

Every stack potentially represents a building that once existed somewhere else.

A kitchen.

A fireplace.

A vestibule.

A bathroom.

A shopfront.

A grand house.

Perhaps even a building that no longer exists.

Someone Has Been Sorting Them

Then I found another room.

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Through a rough doorway is what looks almost like a tile workshop.

There is a table, a step ladder, stacks of material and, most importantly, panels of tiles arranged vertically against the far wall.

Here the patterns become much easier to understand.

Instead of looking at one isolated square, I could see how different tiles relate to one another. Repeated motifs begin creating borders and fields. Squares become larger geometric compositions.

It feels less like storage and more like experimentation.

Someone has been studying how these things fit together.

And Then There Are the Other Architectural Pieces

The wine room holds more than wine equipment and tiles.

There are doors.

Panels.

Frames.

Furniture.

Old prints.

Fragments of decorative woodwork.

And several enormous carved wooden surrounds that immediately command attention.

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These are spectacular.

Tall twisted columns rise on either side, supporting elaborate pediments with miniature architectural forms and a central oval cartouche. Their scale suggests substantial architectural surrounds, perhaps intended for mirrors, doors, panels or some other interior installation.

I would not assign them a date or original purpose without closer inspection, but stylistically they draw on historicist architectural vocabulary rather than simple agricultural construction.

And here they stand, leaning casually against gigantic wine vats.

Only at Marouatte.

A Door Made Into Something New

One little detail particularly caught my attention.

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There is a wonderfully rustic plank door with old-style iron strap hinges. Above it is a decorative glazed panel, and directly below that a green relief ceramic tile has been incorporated into the woodwork.

Old material and newer intervention sit right beside one another.

It seems almost to summarize the entire château.

Nothing has to be frozen in a single century.

Things are collected.

Saved.

Moved.

Reused.

Loved again.

Upstairs, Another Layer

A rough wooden staircase leads upward.

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Along the wall are framed architectural drawings and prints. Light pours down from above through what looks like a hanging curtain of fine chains or beads.

And upstairs I found still another room.

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Books, pictures, furniture, tile samples, old objects and stored belongings occupy the space. Along one wall, more decorative tiles are propped up almost like paintings.

Nothing about this feels like a conventional curated collection.

And I think that is precisely why I enjoyed it.

Two Histories in One Room

Eventually I came back downstairs and looked again at those enormous barrels.

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That photograph captures the whole story for me.

On one side are great wooden casks from the building’s agricultural past.

In front of them is a table covered with decorative ceramic tiles.

Wine and architecture.

Production and preservation.

One history sitting directly beside another.

I can’t yet say exactly when wine was being produced here, how much was made, what grapes were grown, or when these particular vats were last used. The historical sources I found establish Marouatte’s extensive service buildings but do not give me enough evidence to invent a specific winemaking chronology. So I won’t.

What the physical evidence does tell me is that this was a serious working space. The scale and number of surviving vessels are compelling evidence of a substantial wine-storage and processing function.

And now the same building has become a repository for another kind of history.

The Château That Doesn’t Throw Its Past Away

Perhaps that is what I am beginning to understand about Marouatte.

Its history isn’t confined to the grand rooms.

It is in the enormous pigeon house.

It is behind partially opened doors.

It is in roof timbers and old stone walls.

It is in a wine vat nobody has dismantled.

It is in a decorative tile somebody thought was too beautiful to throw away.

It is even in the dust floating through a shaft of afternoon sunlight.

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I walked into this building expecting to photograph an old wine cellar.

Instead I found an old winery, an architectural salvage collection, a tile library, a workshop and a wonderful jumble of things whose stories are still waiting to be deciphered.

There are beautifully restored historic properties where every object has a label and every visitor follows a prescribed route.

Marouatte isn’t giving me that experience.

It is giving me something I enjoy much more.

It keeps leaving doors open.

And every time I walk through one, I find another story.