For us, wine is just a pretext. The adventure began four years ago with the idea of saving a vineyard on two schist hills on the edge of the Corbières region. Abandoned for six years and facing south, they had suffered greatly. So, the two of us learned on the job how to prune, clear, and restore the vineyard. Given the amount of work involved, no winemaker wanted to take it on, and so, in the process, we became winemakers ourselves.

These 8 hectares of vineyards were cleared by hand: pickaxe! We organized large collective workdays, and today we can say that 50% of the land will be replanted. Our first vintage, L'Ecume des Schistes, was produced in 2017. We produced 1,112 bottles from 8 hectares after two years of hard work—you can imagine we're talking about nectar.

Our primary goal is to cultivate a coherent and respectful relationship between humans and nature. This is why we leave the soil undisturbed. We practice biodynamic farming and apply horn manure to the soil by hand in the spring. We do not use rotary mowers on our vines during the nesting and breeding seasons of animals and insects. We do not use any insecticides. The majority of our work is done by hand since we still do not own a tractor. The only treatments we use (between 0 and 4) are sulfur and, exceptionally, copper.

Next year, all the vines will be sown with green manure and grazed by a herd of six donkeys. We practice gentle pruning and train each year to improve this technique. We don't limit the vines' vigor by trimming, as our vines are currently self-regulating. We gradually remove healthy vines, so we have increased the vineyard by two hectares, which we manage in the same way. We use a little organic fertilizer, based on Bochevo, on the vines that lack vigor. We hope to produce 8,000 bottles in 2019. The grapes are harvested in crates. Destemming is done manually with a destemmer. The press is a manual ratchet press. Punching down is done by foot, and a very small pump allows us to perform pump-overs when necessary.

The wines are neither filtered nor fined. No sulfites were added to the 2017 vintage. In 2018, sulfites were added to only one of our cuvées where volatile acidity was beginning to become pronounced (Le Courage des Oiseaux). We sometimes assist the musts with natural nitrogen to ensure that the indigenous yeasts complete fermentation. Bottling is done by gravity, and labeling and the entire rest of the process—corking, labeling (Nantes style), and boxing—are done by hand.