Terres du Gaugalin, in the Rhone Valley
Everything started when we, Angela and Maxime both went back to university to study winemaking and agroecology. After various field experiences and internships, we found three hectares of beautiful old vines in the Gard region (South of Rhone valley, France) and decided to settle there in 2018 to create Terres du Gaugalin.
Considering the soil as a living being, we started conducting the vineyard organically. Once we discovered natural wine, we could not imagine making wine another way. Three wines came out of our work: Grande Rando, a maceration of red, Déferlantes a light red and Clair Obscur, a petnat of Clairette.
Les Raisins Suspendus, in the Hautes-Alpes region
But our story made a shift in 2020 when we decided to move to the Alps in the Haute-Alpes region of France specifically to make wine. We had lived together in the mountains of the Yukon in Canada and then back in the Gard in France, thus we greatly missed this wild environment. Added to the fact that we find the climate and the geology of this region very interesting and well suited to make the type of wine we like, it motivated us to start once again a new adventure. At the same time, the location and the old abandoned vines we found increased our interest for the area even more. The vines that we are managing are planted between 800m and 1000m of altitude above the Durance river.
This is how Les Raisins Suspendus vineyard was born. The first year entailed a great deal of manual work to restore the abandoned vines without any machinery, except for the draft horse work. We experienced this specific weather, the grapes maturity, the soil behaviour and finally the juice and wine taste first hand.
3 new cuvees were born: L’Adret, a red wine made of Merlot, L’Ubac, a mineral white wine made of Chardonnay and a mix of our ancient vines and aged in clay barrel, and Embruns des Cimes, our very typical red wine made of 32 different varieties of very old grapes (80 to 100 years).
The future
Our project for the next years is to keep restoring the old vineyard and to take care of our new plantation (1,5hectare) of a regional grape called Mollard (meaning Petite montagne) and several alpine grapes such as Mondeuse blanche and Persan.
In the meantime, we kept managing Terres du Gaugalin in the Gard region, as there is a one-month difference in the culture of the vines that allows us to take care of both vineyards in a coordinated manner, however, we decided to stop working on both vineyard as the new plantation and a little baby in our family take us too much time. We keep making Terre du Gaugalin cuvees but we buy the grapes from winemakers we like from Gard and Vaucluse.
The available wines can be bought on our website under the Nos vins page.
Please do not hesitate to write us. We would love to hear from you with any comments, questions or feedback you might have which will definitely contribute to the improvement of our wines.