Dear all,

Thank you again for your many messages of encouragement and kindness! Some of you even came to visit us this summer, sometimes with a surprise in store for us, thank you, it gives us great pleasure every time!

We would have liked to write to you sooner but we were a bit overwhelmed by the stress of our first harvest. In the end, everything went very well, and our first wines are now resting nicely in the vats.

Before the harvest, the month of August was quite intense. First we had to prepare the vines. And as we are organic, we don’t use chemicals to weed: everything is done by hand, and we are not about to forget it (nor are our hands and lumbar vertebrae, nor a whole host of small muscles whose existence we didn’t even suspect but whose capacity to suffer from aches and pains is now empirically established).

It was sometimes tiring, often stressful, but always magical. Our vines have given us many surprises, from the youngest to the oldest. On some of our plots, very young vines, growing next to their more than fifty year old elders, offered us their first quality grapes this year. On others, old vines that we thought had been lost, because when we arrived they were so overgrown with clematis (which we had to remove, again by hand), gave us magnificent bunches of delicious, fleshy and perfectly concentrated grapes.

No doubt they wanted to show their gratitude to us for having finally rid them of those pesky clematis. In recent months, we have been able to measure how lucky we are to be able to work with such a rich and diversified terroir.

Each grape variety present on the estate, of which there are 6 at the moment, has its own particular taste and aesthetic characteristics. Each parcel has its own soil and even climate characteristics. It can happen that it rains on a plot of land located at the foot of our little puech, and that not a drop falls on another plot of land located barely 200 metres higher, on the top of our hill. Chaque pied de vigne a sa vigueur, et sans doute son histoire dont les nœuds de bois formés au fil des ans sont les discrets témoins.

Throughout August, we also monitored the ripeness of the grapes, in conjunction with our beloved lab, which analysed the small bottles of lovingly pressed juice (always by hand).

We then prepared the cellar: a major cleaning of the building from floor to ceiling, the vats, the wine pumps, all the equipment potentially useful during the harvest and vinification period, the press, the destemmer, the harvest pump, etc. A huge thank you to Simon, who spent a lot of time teaching us the value and function of our own tools, which without him we would not have mastered so quickly. And when we say tamed…

And on the evening of August 29, the miracle happened: everything was ready and operational, dare we say gleaming, for the start of our very first harvest! … which began on the morning of 30 August for the first plot of white grapes, planted with white grenache and grey grenache.

Thanks to the generous help of several winegrowers in the village, we were able to harvest our five and a half hectares of vines little by little, calmly, at the rhythm of their arrival at maturity, to finish with our last parcels of Grenache noir on 19 September.

The harvest was finally a little better than we expected in this year of spring frost, we were very lucky.

It was therefore in very good conditions that we were able to start the vinification phase. We also owe a lot to our families who have given us constant help, whether in the vineyard, in the cellar for pumping over, delestage, racking, etc., or to look after our daughters when we were too busy playing the apprentice winemaker. To all the family, a big thank you!

Our oenology practice has been very supportive throughout this period and has guided us perfectly throughout the season. Many thanks to Caroline, Claire, Marie and Marie-Emmanuelle for their talent, kindness and patience!

After a few weeks of hard work, we are proud to announce that we have succeeded: we have made what is technically called wine!

We still have a lot of painstaking work ahead of us to get this wine exactly where we want it to be (if it wants to be), but it is already very good!

Because yes, of course, you can imagine that Aymeric did not procrastinate in front of the peril and generously gave of himself to taste the wine himself at each stage of its elaboration, then to taste again to be sure, then to taste again to be really really sure. All this is purely professional, it is only a strict quality control supervision.

Now the maturing process begins and, if all goes well, next spring we will have enough to let you taste some of our red wines, a white, a rosé and even … a blanc de noirs!

Here it is, the little surprise mentioned in our previous message. As we don’t have many white grapes on the estate at the moment, and what’s more, these whites have suffered a lot from the frost, we had the idea of taking inspiration from our friends in Champagne to offer you a blanc de noirs (but as a still wine, the Champagne inspiration stops there). The idea was to work with a black grape full of freshness, in this case a Cinsault, but to vinify it in white. It will be the white dress of black dresses, in short. It was Sarah’s idea!

We are really looking forward to showing you the fruits of our humble labour and we really hope you enjoy it. We plan to organise a few trips before next summer, notably to Paris, to organise tastings. We will of course inform you in advance.

During the coming months, we will continue to refine our first wines, and devote ourselves to other projects: renovation of the building to be able to welcome you, creation of our website, planting of new grape varieties, acquisition of new plots…

Until then, our vines will take advantage of the autumn to rest a little. In the meantime, we wish you all a beautiful day and a wonderful autumn.

Sarah and Aymeric