Grapes: Grolleau
Region: Loire, France
Vintage: 2021
Viticulture: Biodynamic
Soils: Schiste + Quartz
Yeasts: Native
Vinification: Harvested by hand, then whole-cluster maceration in vats, between 8-15 days
Aging: 12 months in barrels then bottled.
Fining or Filtering: None
Notes from the Importer: Stéphanie Debout and Vincent Bertin (hence Deboutbertin) met at university while studying engineering. They moved to Paris, but quickly became disillusioned with city life and pined for the countryside. One of their friend’s fathers, Jean-Philippe Fichet, is a winemaker in Burgundy, and on a trip to visit him they became entranced by his passion for the craft of winemaking. That was that. They decided to go and do a vintage with a winemaker in the Loire in 2011 to test the waters, and in Stéphanie’s words, it was love at first sight. They had fallen for the vigneron life. By 2012, they had handed in their resignation notices, bought a house and a vineyard, and signed up for winemaking school.
For them, the most important thing is the overall health of their vineyards. This has brought them to agroforestry, and they now interplant their vineyards with trees. In doing so, they break the monocultural mould of the vineyard, instead creating an area in which other species of plants can thrive. This is a young couple who demonstrate vinous minimalism in the best way possible. These are pure wines of soul that have nothing added, nothing taken away.
