Nature, Patience, Trust and Gold
Our philosophy of winemaking, in four words.
Nature
The first step is bringing in the grapes: one year ends and another begins. The harvest is the link between the vines and the cellar. Everything is buzzing, and the air is filled with the sweet smell of grapes. We pick all our grapes by hand; they arrive intact at the winery and are gently pressed. We never know how the harvest will be — more than ever, we depend on nature and its unpredictability.
Patience
Slowly pressed for 5 to 24 hours, slowly fermented for 2 to 12 months. We spend a year cultivating the vine to grow the best grapes, and a year in the cellar making the best wine. Our greatest tool is time and patience: we let the wine evolve and become its own.
Trust
We don’t act upon the wine; we act around it. That means creating an environment we trust. Our 12th-century cellar has a unique culture of enzymes and yeasts that is naturally present, and it helps the wines ferment safely, even at low temperatures. We use casks of European oak from Aßmann Büttnerei, which bring micro-oxygenation to the wine. And we trust that our work in the vines has produced grapes with everything they need inside them to become excellent wines.
Gold
The last step before bottling is filtering the wine — in other words, “the birth of the wine”, as winemaker Eric LICHTLÉ would say. This step polishes the wine to reveal its golden shine and refined aromas. It takes months to reach this point, a journey our wines make themselves in a trusted environment. We simply need the patience to see what was naturally present in our grapes, to make a golden wine.