It all starts at the vineyard with manual, rigorous work throughout the year. We take a lot of care to the vine starting with pruning. A decisive step in the management of the vine. We practice the pruning in simple Guyot as well as in Cordon de Royat. The branches are then pulled and crushed to be able to attach the chopsticks. We “disassemble” the vines in mid-January to prune them definitively in March in order to delay bud break as much as possible in the event of spring frost. We are constantly thinking in order to preserve and optimize the management of our vines. As the budding approaches and the exit of the first leaves, disbudding allows us to regulate the harvest. We therefore remove the counter-buds by hand and clean the cord and baguette in order to have ventilated feet, limiting the pressure of diseases and promoting better ripeness of the grapes. We then perform a first trimming by hand and then in a tractor. A slight leaf stripping is then carried out in order to have an optimal maturity of the grapes. We also changed the trellising height. The vine stakes were at 1m20 and now they are at 1m60 for a leaf area of 1m80. This makes it possible to have a larger leaf area to improve photosynthesis and shade given global warming. We therefore do everything by hand (slicing…) because the trellising being higher, we can no longer pass by tractor, which makes it possible not to compact the soil. “You have to know how to listen to the vine and adapt every year. We planted plant covers, in order to boost the biological activity of soils, improve their structure, increase the rate of organic matter and touch/plough the soils as little as possible so as not to destroy the microbial life of the soils. The roots of plant covers decompact and naturally aerate the soil. We therefore mow the inter-rows with a small mowing tractor. We want to develop more lively soils! No pesticides are used in our vineyard. Our treatments are mainly based on fresh plants (dandelion, nettle, horsetail…) that we pick ourselves and for which we make our own decoctions, infusions and extractions in order to put very low doses of sulfur and copper in our vines.”