Our dream land
Cultivating love
It is with love that we value
our region located a little away from the village of Aniane, in the Hérault, by simply using common sense.
A great wine is born from a great grape, a great grape is born from a great terroir.
And as prestigious as it is, you have to know how to take care of it with love…
We give priority to
the taste, the taste and still the taste to all
stages of development :
We privilege the taste, the taste and still the taste in all the stages of the development:
The taste determines the date of the harvest
because we taste the grapes every day and we harvest only when the grapes are phenolically mature, because beyond the traditional technical measures, we harvest only when the seeds, pulp and skin of the grapes taste as we dreamed.
…the right time of vinification
because we taste the grape must every day, sometimes even twice a day to achieve the perfect extraction of aromas and tannins.
…and the right assembly.
we taste again and again to marry our different grape varieties until we manage to express our evidence, to go towards the true and the good…
Good taste and common sense.
Our new vineyards are planted with 5 different grape varieties.
In red, an assortment of syrah, mourvèdre, grenache, carignan, cinsault, nielluccio.
In white, one out of two vines will be Sauvignon, the other Chardonnay. And we will add some vermentino.
The idea is to attenuate the effect of the grape variety to put the terroir forward. In 10 years, the entire plot will be planted. Mycorrhization allows the ripening to be tightened and everything to be harvested in one pass.
17 different species of fruit hedges alternate with our rows of vines to mimic the perfect forest ecosystem.
Thus, it joins the vineyard. It provides water, shade and the whole agroecological system.
To reduce the number of machine passages, we spread straw from the estate and cardboard boxes recovered from the bottling process. The practice allows us to obtain more humid soils. This year, we did not need to irrigate the mulched plots. The vine is less stressed by water and the wines have a better sugar/acid balance. In a word, a balanced and living soil takes care of the vine. It allows the blossoming of ripe and mature grapes at the phenolic level.
We no longer have to treat our vines, or almost, with such a process. Mother Nature is well made, and when she is allowed to live, to take back her rights, it becomes magical, almost revolutionary. This is what we call vitiforestry. Each plot will be surrounded by trees of all sizes within a few years. The goal is to see only a few vines in the middle of the woods.
We grow vegetables in permaculture between the rows of vines to promote biodiversity on certain plots. Finally, the bees for which fellow flowers have been planted in the vineyards pollinate the fruit hedges. And the fruit is transformed into gourmet desserts in the group’s restaurants.
The soil work is not mechanized…
We work our land with the utmost respect for nature.
Our soil is alive without chemicals.
It is composed of multiple bacteria and fungi. The ideal ecosystem of the vine is 1/3 fungi and 2/3 bacteria.
Year after year, we see life returning to the estate. There are far fewer mosquitoes, but bats, companies of partridges, hares, wild boars (greedy)…
… So many ancestral practices that paradoxically make us avant-garde.
Boris and Leticia want to create a sustainable system by putting in place all the good practices for the next generations.
They function as a lab of the future, never short of ideas. By never fearing to do anything like the others. Soon, Boris and Leticia wish to introduce a cow that will naturally pre-prune the vines and sheep that will regulate the grass cover, to design a pond that will further increase biodiversity and temper the environment and to build a new cellar with a lower part 5 meters below ground, a green roof and a natural temperature regulation thanks to Canadian wells.
Boris and Leticia’s dream?
That in a few years, a satellite photo shows the Grande Sieste as a small building with a few vines in the middle of the forest. The soul of La Grande Sieste: to do the best for nature and to make good wines that we share.
