Le Champ du Possible - Jacques Pierre

I have been living in Laragne Montéglin in the Hautes Alpes since 2019, I took over a vineyard from a friend who made his wine for sharing and family consumption, without any products in winemaking and just a little sulfur and Bordeaux mixture in the vines.

I stayed true to this approach, managed to find other vineyards and plant new plots, and now have 3 hectares under my belt. Currently, only half is truly in production, and even then, yields are very low. I harvested the first grapes from the new planting this year, but the quantity wasn't significant. Here's how I work. In the vineyard, I weed mechanically in some plots—raking, using inter-row cultivators—and manually with a hoe. Others remain grassed over and are mowed in late spring. For treatments, I use the bare minimum of Bordeaux mixture; I have another product used in organic farming with very little copper that gives excellent results against downy mildew (which is very rare in our region) and a little sulfur against powdery mildew. I'm going to try implementing treatments with plant-based liquid manure, decoctions, and essential oils next year. The harvest is, of course, done by hand, and I collect the grapes in crates. In the cellar, I use indigenous yeasts and vinify in concrete tanks, then in fiberglass tanks for clarification during the winter using cold stabilization. No filtration, no fining, none of that nonsense. As for sulfites, I'm not a purist; if a cuvée really shows an off-flavor, I might use some as a backup, but no more than 20 ml. I prefer to add a little rather than have sulfite-free but flawed wines. I've held the Nature & Progrès label since spring 2022.