Urban, former engineer, I chose a new path in 2008 by wanting to reconcile an in-life of attention to the environment - organic farming, ecology, social impact of our actions - with my real life. Go to the countryside, seek autonomy, build a family farm. Space around you, trees, a peaceful environment, a low carbon life, doing and seeing where our food comes from - the act that we repeat every day, an extremely important act! Reconcile my way of thinking with what I do day by day. The vine called me by the manual work it requires (many tasks cannot be mechanized) and one day of visit / discovery, I came across Mark Angeli. And there, a world opened up to me. A surprising and unexpected discourse on the vines, coming out of the blabla my-terroir-it's-the-most-beautiful, but an explanation on the links between the living, the earth, the cosmos, the energies, a form of applied spirituality in the vineyard. Vindiou! This awakens me, questions me about these funny and not common words, and then after tasting the wines ... Ok, that's what I want to do. Net. Slice. It must be said that the guy does not have a common path, that he militates to install people on small surfaces far from the advice of the Chamber of Agriculture and unions, and that he just says: I cultivate in a different way , I make a different wine, it's possible. On my way, after having started a retraining, I have the "luck" to be able to follow a training course like Professional Certificate Responsible for Agricultural Exploitation. Thus began a year in Beaune. Let's be honest: it was useless, but I had some nice meetings. Fortunately for my development, in parallel, I lived with Olivier Cousin. Ahhh Olivier, the Angevin lao-tzu. What a man! Already, drinking his wine regularly changed my palate. No more additives, no manipulation of grapes, make way for pure juice! Wines that speak, that move, that have a soul. "Traditional" wine, hard hard! Having learned to identify sulfur, I only saw him. And he didn't tell me anything, no story (I suspect that's why we "drink the labels": wines revealing themselves as flat, the label becomes the only source of a story) . Olivier, his thing, is the hobby. Horses do you want some here. Pleasure. Hard work too. And when it's time, the day, the vines wait, we go to gardening. We first try to feed ourselves. Chickens, geese, vegetables, delicious meals, the good life ... to the rhythm of the steeple, the steps of the hair, the words of the men and all without noisy machines ... Logical result: in 2010 I found a few hectares of vines in the town of Faye d'Anjou. Bingo! I take, I start. And the adventure begins! Disagree with many current choices, and with this feeling that willy-nilly, it will have to change, I try to find my way, full of life, in balance. By respecting life by hedges / refuges, by letting the grass settle, by refusing synthetic chemicals, by favoring the work of man on that of the machine, by working on a small surface, by taking enjoy what i do. On purple shale soil - the peculiarity of this area located in the heart of Layon - are planted vines of Chenins of ~ 40 years and Cabernet Franc of ~ 25 years. A small plot of grolleau, a local red grape variety, on psammite soil and planted on a non-mechanizable hill, completes the picture. I work the wines to keep a maximum of liveliness and nervousness; I like wines that spin straight in the mouth with a strong mineral component. I only use manual presses, ratchet with long presses (at least 16h). The advantage is a measured extraction and the exclusive use of human force. The grapes are mostly crushed. Most wines are capped to keep freshness, avoid releasing tannin during aging in the bottle, dodge different cork tastes and for ease of storage - no management of hygrometry, temperature changes (little people can boast of having a real cellar suitable for storing wine). A point on the containers: stainless steel and fiber; used barrels of at least 10 wines; glass demijohns. The wines all have a minimum year of aging. Bottling is done by gravity and at home, by me. We re-use the empty bottles brought to us as much as possible. The labels (made on recycled paper) are glued by hand with a biodegradable glue.