« When I create a wine, I’m not looking to impress.
A fine wine must enthral. »
Christine Vernay
Christine Vernay stands out due to the unique personality of her wines. She owes their elegance to her work with the vine, but also in the cellar. Without ever confining herself to systematic practices, she experiments, tests, tastes, tests, tastes and adapts depending on the years and the characteristics of the vintages. Here, nothing is left to chance, but everything is constantly reassessed, adapted and adjusted. Christine Vernay does not simplify things; she goes into detail and loves it. It is her very own hallmark, perfectly unapologetic…
« I have a very strong attachment to my vines and my terroirs I love identifying the terroirs and allowing them to express themselves. All my wines come from my vines and the grapes that I have cared for.”
Christine Vernay is therefore constantly searching out the meeting point between her personality and the terroir. She reveals the wine as much as the excellence she expects of it. Intensity, tension, freshness…
« The colour, the aromas… everything that the wine slowly releases to the senses has a meaning and must be interpreted ».
Time does its work, amid the secret of the cellars, the wines slowly develop, releasing aromas, building structure. Behind the breathable wood, each of the wines gradually matures before, one day, providing an amazing encounter.
Once again, the choices reveal Christine Vernay’s beliefs. For both the reds and whites, the nature of the containers (tanks, barrels, etc.) enables her to craft her search for the expression of the terroirs.
From the land to the glass, every stage in the life of the future wine is a decisive moment.
Christine Vernay supervises each step because she has long known that she also owes the exceptional quality of her wines to the sum of all the details that make a fine wine possible. Biodynamics requires that bottling takes place on still days with no wind, preferably a fruit day (when the moon is in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius) and with a waxing moon.
As for the emotion that emerges from La Caille on such days, it is unique, and also the emotion of a team that is seeing the culmination of the care taken… to take care.
Deciding the harvest date is a pressure and a responsibility repeated every year. It takes all her experience, skill, knowledge of her vines, intuition and courage at this crucial moment. A moment filled with stress but also full of promise.
Once the grape is received into the cellar the fruit from these vines, worked for generations, and maintained and developed by Christine and Luc with a firmly-established growing ethos.
The grapes that go into every vintage are not only the expression of the four seasons of working the land, but of many more years besides.
It is important to be able to listen to the land, its vines, its wines. That is how it becomes possible to make the best.
“I love Caravaggio’s paintings. Art, literature, cinema, poetry and theatre inspire my world every day. I don’t just make wines: wine is also my canvas and each one imparts a piece of me. Sometimes, you can hear Caravaggio’s paintings in them…” Christine Vernay
There are many ways to “make a wine”, but Christine Vernay will tell you that she creates them. Long before blending starts, she considers her blends, composes, then begins, tastes, again, goes back, recreates in her head, adjusts, revisits, tastes again and so on, until the wine expresses what she wants from it: the terroir, the vintage, her range.
Creation, collection, every year a unique script for each wine.