Practices

Wine-Making

Once harvested, our grapes reach the winery in small boxes of 20 kg, and are then carefully sorted on two sorting tables.
- The first vibrating table allows us to evacuate moisture, any dry berries, and any small insects naturally present in the bunches.
- The second table allows the sorters to select the best bunches, and the bunches that will be kept whole, including the stalks.
For red wines, the choice of whole-bunch fermentation (around 50%), depending on cuvée and vintage, is intended to bring freshness, structure, tension, complexity, and beautiful aromatic persistence. Sorting is a crucial step in ensuring great wines every year. Our grapes are poured into thermo-regulated tanks by gravity, to avoid crushing, which can lead to bad tannins. Alcoholic fermentation will then gradually begin (natural fermentation with native yeasts).
For two to three weeks, and with little mechanical intervention (pigeage or remontage, i.e. punching down or pumping over), maceration is gentle. This approach to wine-making allows us to obtain the natural release of wine components in an infusion of grapes.
We taste our cuvées once or twice a day, and that is how we judge whether light punching down or pumping over is necessary for some of the tanks.
We let each wine find its own balance in terms of temperature during the fermentation phase, taking care not to exceed 33°C.
A pneumatic press is used on the marc (pomace, or grape residue).  We taste the juice at each step, retaining only the juice from the first press for our wines, to provide the necessary subtlety of structure.
Our small yields bring natural viscosity, allowing us to barrel down the wines with very little lees.