It’s my Vineyard

Last June Fred’s brother was visiting us from Canada, and one evening he took us to eat here, imagine my excitement when I heard the couple on the next table order a bottle of our wine. That also was a first and we felt we had arrived! Don then insisted on ordering a bottle to go with our cheese, the sweet, worked-off-his-feet, very camp waiter smiled at me and whispered

“I know it good sometimes I drink the ends of the bottle that customers have left!”

On our next visit we took him a bottle and he was quite overcome, now he always kisses me hello. We paid 16 euros for our wine that night! The mark up in restaurants is enormous and in spite of the over production in the world today it is the farmer who suffers the financial blows you will find out later on.

So why did we do it? Why did we buy a vineyard in France?

We have always had a love affair with France and for many years have spent holidays either on our old wooden sailing boat, and later a small water mill in the Auvergne region of France. The former, sadly, we sold to partly finance the wine venture and the latter we still enjoy when we have time and I grow vegetables there, ones that can look after themselves a bit and that I can make chutney from [recipes to follow when the season gets going] Fred can ‘play’ with the old tractor we bought from monsieur Maume… and that is another whole story.

We were approaching retirement from a life time in academia and tried to find just a few vines in the Auvernge, we had become quite accustomed to the wines of this region, they have a sharp rather piquante volcanic taste, however they are not well known outside the area and certainly the wine production is not set up or organised in the way it is in Beaujolais and it is quite evident that neither us would be able to learn the ‘trade’ or make superb wine with no knowledge or family heritage behind us.

It was essential that we look for a metayage arrangement where a vigneron would work the land and make the wine receiving as salary half the production. We were pushed further east to find what we needed and after many, many days and weeks of trawling the specialist estate agents in key towns we discovered Maison des Bulliats and its seven and three quarter hectares of vines. This is crazy, far too big, a beautiful square ‘maison de maitre’ that had been loved but not hugely cared for, all that work….and a business to run. This at a time, although we were not fully aware of the critical nature of the global wine situation then, when wine was difficult to sell. Over production and other factors meant that to be successful we had to work hard and make an excellent wine.

We thought long and hard but kept coming back to Maison des Bulliats. We had, on second viewing of the property, met Pascal Grandjean the vigneron who we felt right from the start we could work with. Later we realised his passion, talent and skill for making wine. He was like a master chef, I later thought, getting excited as he spoke of the whole vinification process, adding a little of this and of that to make a wine that has character and a true taste of the land and its fruits and minerals, a real ‘gout du terroir’

We moved in May 2005 and the trials and tribulations, the adventures, the people we have met, the joy of being involved with the production of this delicious wine is keeping us very active. Every day things happen. I will be looking back sometimes at some of these times, but also letting you know what is happening NOW.