Wine talks

Living the Dream – 10 years on!

Tue, 29 May 2012 14:55:48 +0000

Living the Dream – 10 years on!

On 31st May we will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of purchasing and moving into Domaine de Sainte Rose. As we reflect on the past decade we find ourselves revisiting the initial dream and see that it lives on!

These days, very few people can claim to be living their dream. We are two of the few who can. Our decision to cast aside our respective international careers in order to establish and run a high-quality, boutique, wine business in rural France was driven by a desire to work together and to create a family business of our own. To many it seemed like madness, especially as we were expecting our first child. It certainly involved a large degree of risk and a huge amount of determination to follow a mutual dream.

The dream began while we were living in the Former Soviet Union. The original research into the global wine industry started there during the cold, Soviet winter weekends using the Internet as a window to the outside world. On our return to London, we challenged the dream, wondering whether it had been a form of escapism, the product of living in an unusual and somewhat isolated country. It wasn’t. We both left our jobs to embark on a tour of the wine growing areas that we were considering as a base for our project.

Our passion for wine and our desire to invest in an ‘emerging’ wine-producing area, rather than an area that was already well established, led us to the exciting and highly diverse French wine-producing region of Languedoc-Roussillon. As is now commonly recognized, the reputation of this fascinating area is undergoing a transformation from that of a low quality/high volume producer, to that of a high quality/low volume producer, driven by an increasingly enthusiastic marketplace. Our dream had always been to produce quality wine and the property we found, Domaine de Sainte Rose, provided us with the raw materials we needed.

In the ten years that we have been at Sainte Rose we have completely redesigned the winery, turning it into a state-of-the-art facility; we have implemented major improvements in the vineyards, using environmentally sensitive farming techniques; and we have successfully introduced our wine into ten different markets around the world. To our immense satisfaction, our wine has been universally well-received by both the wine trade and the ultimate consumer in all the countries where the wine is available.

All this is in addition to the ongoing challenge of balancing home and office life under one roof and a work environment that does not correspond to a traditional organisational structure. The risk still exists and the determination now required is twofold as the business continues to develop. However given we are living our dream we remain two of the most fulfilled and genuinely happy individuals around!

Olives!

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:20:26 +0000

Olives?

The seeds of another small product diversification project were sown today as we planted 50 young olive trees next to the new Chardonnay plantation. Watch out for limited edition Sainte Rose olive oil in the years to come! We do not have the equipment, (or the time!) to make our own oil, but have a local cooperative press that will take our olives and process them for us. We’re looking forward to tasting it already even though it may be two years before the trees start producing!

Sparkling Sainte Rose?

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:25:29 +0000

Sainte Rose Sparkling?

IGP fizz from the plains of the Languedoc? Wine snobs will laugh at the prospect but at Sainte Rose we don’t much care about that! We have a reputation for doing things a little differently, of championing lesser known grape varieties and of putting together unusual wine blends that work! Thus, never happy to rest on our laurels, this vintage we’re going to experiment on a very small scale, with making sparkling chardonnay!

The rules within the IGP system changed as of 2011 to allow production of sparkling wine. So as lovers of well made bubbly from many different parts of the world this is just too good an opportunity to miss! Let’s face it, given we have just planted 4 hectares of Chardonnay, we have to think creatively and keep all options open! Anyway we’re very excited at the prospect and if you watch this space, there may be news of cooler climate fizz plans yet to come .....

Planting Rights and Wrongs!

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:03:24 +0000

Planting Rights and Wrongs!

In our veg patch we plant tomatoes and chillis, and in our orchard we have peaches and figs. We don’t have to ask permission to plant, nor pay for the privilege. Transferring this to a larger scale, you would have thought that owning a wine Domaine with viticultural land meant that you could plant whatever vines you wanted on it, whenever you wanted? In the new world wine producing countries, you would be right. But in France this is your first planting wrong! In order to have the privilege of planting vines in your vineyards, you require planting rights, and if you do not own any (though pulling up existing vineyards), then you have to purchase them.

Planting rights are created by the Ministry of Agriculture, distributed by France AgriMer (another government body) and managed by the French Customs’ Viticulture department (Douanes). Once you have your planting rights, (which will set you back a cool €1000 Euros per hectare and must be used within the following 7 years or else they expire), you then need permission from the aforementioned Douanes department to plant vines using these rights. Permission is only given if you are planting the varieties that are ‘allowed’ by the IGP or AOP system that you adhere to, i.e. how you classify your wines once produced. Only when you have all this can you actually get on with the work itself!

So why do planting rights exist? Essentially it is another means (along with the restrictions on yield) of controlling wine production. This one could understand in the days of the European wine lake when over-production and over-cropping caused a massive oversupply of wine. But those days are gone, there have been hundreds of hectares of vines pulled up and those who still want to produce are being encouraged to restructure (i.e. Replant) their vineyards with better quality varieties. Times have changed so much so that the EC Council ruled that the system of planting rights should be abolished by 2015, with the possibility of keeping them at a national level until 2018.

Great, we think, only a few more years and then this bureaucratic process will disappear! Not so! Nicolas Sarkozy, under pressure from a multitude of protectionist wine bodies, most notably the INAO, has opposed the suppression of planting rights claiming it will lead to disaster!

Hence we grin and bear it and put it down as another one of those challenges of running a wine business in France! Planting those Chardonnay vines a few weeks ago was a breeze compared to the bureaucratic hoops we jumped through to earn the right to plant!