Winemaking

Winemaking

The winemaking process starts with the choice of the optimum date for harvest. Several maturities need to concur with dry weather.

The best selection is in the vineyard. Prior to harvest, we eliminate any unripe as well as any rotten berries. Depending on the meteorological conditions of the vintage, this can take from one to three passages in the vineyard, ranging from three weeks to one day before harvest. We don’t believe in sorting in the cellar. It’s too little too late.

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© Sonia Clua

The hand-picked grapes are brought to the cellar in small crates and pressed extremely gently, using only low pressure with the so-called “méthode champenoise”, for the whites. For the reds we de-stem by hand, with a traditional de-stemmer made from wicker.

Our winemaking process is most traditional, avoiding any additives and sulfites as much as possible.

The caps of the red wines are punched down by hand. Thus we can get the best feeling for our precious raw material, the state of extraction and on-going fermentation as well as the various temperatures in the vat.

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© Sonia Clua

For Chasselas we use stainless steel vats. For all other varieties we use French oak barrels.

The new oak proportion is adapted to each wine and to each vintage. Only the sweet wine is always matured in 100 % new french oak barrels. It spends two years in the "Barriques" which are selected and made especially for this wine.  All white varieties except Chasselas are regularly stirred with a stick ( a “diodine” actually ), thereby integrating the fine lees into the maturing wine, so-called “bâtonage”. This is done to increase the complexity of the wine, by extracting all the richness the raw material can offer. The bâtonnage are performed in accordance with the lunar calendar, on either a fruit day or a flower day.

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Same goes with bottling, it is performed on fruit days or flower days, on a waning moon.