Ma relation avec le vin elle a en fait commencé avec des cubis dégueulasses à 5 € ! Rien de très excitant… Mais c’est aux États-Unis que tout a changé. Ma femme étant étasunienne j’y ai vécu 4 ans. J’y ai travaillé en tant que caviste puis sommelier. Sans le savoir à l’époque, j’ai eu la chance de découvrir le vin en goûtant de tout. Des vins français, des vins américains, de tous les cépages, de toutes les couleurs, des vins industriels, des vins d’artisans. J’ai compris que même si je le voulais, je n’arriverais pas à tout savoir, tout comprendre, et que c’était bien mieux ainsi.
C’est en tant que sommelier que j’ai vraiment compris ce qu’il était en train de se passer en France. Tous les jours, je voyais arriver des bouteilles folles, ces vignerons qui travaillaient différemment, des gens qui étaient fiers de leur terroir, mais qui ne vouaient pas toujours un culte à leur AOC, des gens à qui on avait dit que ce n’était pas possible de faire du vin sans chimie de synthèse et qui finalement sans emmerder personne, le faisaient de manière remarquable.
We want to work with living things! From the start, wine has to be alive. That means working with the vine. Wine is made in the vineyard! Damn it. We forbid ourselves from using synthetic herbicides. We're here to support biodiversity! Nature is built that way—we multiply differences to be more stable and more efficient; it's kind of fundamental. In our vineyards, you'll see a wide variety of flowers and insects, all this little ecosystem finds its way onto the grapes. The yeasts that develop on the grapes, they're alive too—we want diversity everywhere! This whole philosophy runs from the soil to the bottle. In school, they teach you to control everything and fix everything. We see our wines a bit like children: our role isn’t to tell them what they’re going to become, it’s to guide them to become what they want to be.
OUR VALUES
The argument against this is that if you leave wine alone, it will turn into vinegar. Of course, if you leave a child without guidance, they’ll become a bit wild. We need nuance these days! Just because we want to let the wine make itself doesn’t mean we’re doing nothing. But like with children, we want to give wine the freedom to express itself. Spending all your time in fear of what might go wrong isn’t a great life philosophy. We prefer to set things up so that everything goes well, and if a problem really does arise one day, we’ll act. In reality, it’s quite easy to replicate a recipe year after year: add 30g of this, 30g of that, to avoid any issues. But that’s not really wine, that’s chemistry. It’s interesting and requires skills, but it’s not really wine... On the other hand, saying you harvest the grapes and then don’t touch them, no matter what happens, is also the easy way out. It’s harder to walk the tightrope, to work case by case. But for us, that’s the most honest approach. Our goal is pure juice: no additives whatsoever. That’s the aim for all our wines. But we’re just getting started! We’re learning, finding our footing. We don’t come from winemaking families, and we proudly claim the right to make mistakes!
