Les incontournables du Sud-Ouest

Alain Brumont has achieved in 30 years what others take generations to accomplish. He definitely made his debut in the 90s when the guide Gault & Millau awarded him the "Best Winegrower of the 80s" and then when Wine Advocate marked a 96/100 rating for his 1995 Château Montus Prestige cuvée!

Emmanuel, an agricultural engineer, had the crazy idea of making wine 15 metres under the sea! He filed the patent in 2007 and settled on a vineyard on the Basque coast in St-Jean-de-Luz. Its wines undergo a second fermentation in vats immersed in the middle of the bay. The extraordinary conditions - darkness, thermal inertia and regular agitation due to tidal pressure variations - reveals aromatic profiles that do not appear under more conventional conditions.

It is necessary to go back far, in the genesis of the Jurançon soils where the ice age followed by global warming gave rise to a soil of clay and pebbles. From these distant times the vines draw all their sap and freshness from the ground. It is on the lands of "Caussapé", where the first vines were planted in 1558, that is, in Béarnais, now called "Cauhapé". Magic of nature, the vines warm up to the first rays of the sun.

Domaine de Laballe has been in Cyril's family since 1820, but has only been producing wine since the 1970s. Indeed, the grapes of this region are generally largely reserved for Armagnac. The vineyard is located on a singular, not very extensive terroir, called "Sables Fauves", where only two winegrowers produce wines in IGP Landes. The estate also extends to the Côte de Gascogne where the vintages produced have recently attracted the Revue du Vin de France.