As anyone who has ever got his fingers sticky in the fruity blood of the Grenache grape under the blazing sun of Castelmaure knows full well: wine must have the taste of what it is, its terroir. A taste that rings true. A deep, fundamental, earthy truth that all the frills of vinification and oenology will never manage to replace. But don’t see in that a plea for some obscurantism, for some Virgilian naivety, but wine is, and must remain the child of its earth. Likewise, its sincerity, its grandeur too, pass through the callous hand of the grape-picker, hard work and the respect for a job well done. Wine is a child of the soil and the sweat of men. The grape-harvest, which gushes forth each year from the same barrel as all the old human rituals, betrays the ambiguity of the links that unite Man and Nature. Struggle and love. On the one hand, the Ancients who called the vineyards the “galleys” because of the slope, the stones, and the climate… On the other hand, this vine-grower who secretly talks tenderly to his old vine stocks to congratulate them, to thank them … It is true that here, in Castelmaure, things have changed considerably. The men have changed. The impetus came at the beginning of the eighties. Under the leadership of Patrick de Marien, the chairman, and of Bernard Pueyo, the director, the 70 members of the village old co-op began by asking themselves about their vines : which terroirs? Which varieties? This led them to upgrade the majority of their vines by replacing certain poorly-suited Carignans with Syrahs, Grenaches and, more recently, with Mourvèdres. Then, struggle and love as ever, a vast vine nursery was created in 1993 in the heart of the maquis, on the schist – which at the same time made it possible to create firebreaks. For even greater thoroughness, all of the parcels – about 760 in all – were inspected and the characteristics recorded on computer. As a result, each parcel at Castelmaure is known, supervised individually by a technician who dedicates all of his time to this task. They have re-learned to prune, plough, check yields, sort, select, with the permanent preoccupation of respect for the environment and for the health of the consumer. Naturally, all the grapes are harvested by hand, in small harvesting tubs to better preserve the fruit and their aromas.
In the cellar too, the revolution has been on the march for 20 years: vats hygiene, temperature control, ultramodern pressing, all contribute now to the better expression of the richness of the terroir. In parallel, since the real quality of the wines of Castelmaure only comes into its own over the years, the cellar has for a long time implemented a policy of maturing its wines. In particular thanks to the setting up of large cellars housing the barrels and the development of new vinification methods to which the best French experts – Dominique Laurent from Burgundy, Michel Tardieu from the Rhone valley and Languedoc, like Marc Dubernet – have contributed.