HC-vins - Corentin Houillon

From a very young age, I was already pressing Pierre Overnoy's 1991 Ploussard by foot. That's how my life as a winemaker began. It was my grandmother, Anna Houillon, who took me to her vineyard in Pupillin for holidays. I learned a great deal there, evolving over the years just like the vines of my native Jura. My apprenticeship in wine tasting began during the 1993 harvest with Pierre's wines, surrounded by my uncles and aunt (Manu, Aurélien, and Adeline).

All this accumulated energy and knowledge motivated me to choose a career in winemaking rather than the engineering path I'd been led to pursue. That's when the journey began, starting with schools in Beaune and then Montpellier, where I earned my BTS (Advanced Vocational Diploma) in Viticulture and Oenology. Surprised by what I had learned about wine, I decided to gain my own experience by working in a variety of environments. This allowed me to work at prestigious biodynamic estates in France (Stéphane Tissot, Dominique Derain) and New Zealand (Urlar), as well as in wineries within the international wine industry (William Selyem, California; McGuigan, Australia).

Then the opportunity to make my own choices arose, and I joined Domaine de la Ville in Morges, Switzerland. I was head winemaker there from 2015 to the end of 2018, and notably converted the estate to biodynamic farming and created the natural wines P982, 902, 900, 976, and Méthode Ancestrale. Discovering the consequences of my own choices led me towards independence. After bottling my 2018 Helvète vintage, I settled in Chautagne, a small Jura valley in northern Savoy, nestled between the Grand Colombier mountain to the west and the Gros Foug to the east.