During this week of vinification, I’m no longer making wine.
That may sound strange when there are vats full of juice behind me. But the more I work with this vineyard, the more I realize that the real purpose of Le Clos de Torméry is not simply to draw grapes from the soil and turn them into wine. It is to tend to the soil itself — and, ultimately, to the living vineyard that produces those grapes.
This week I measure sugar and temperature in the vats, check the bourbes and discover that there are nearly 400 litres of them — and, yes, I taste them. I taste the moux too. And it is wonderfully, almost ridiculously good.
I also give the vines a little boost with my “multivitamin” after harvest. They look tired to me. And perhaps vines are a little like women: they need attention, care, love… and sometimes a few kisses.
So this episode gets into something I’ve been thinking about more and more: our relationship with vines, with the land, with love, and with what it really means to make wine.
And, as always, the day ends at Le Clos de Torméry with a sunset — and an unexpected appearance from Virginie.
#vineyard #wineharvest #winemaking #savoie #frenchwine #mondeuse #thenorthfaceofwine
Welcome to The North Face of Wine.
After 40 years in New York studying health, resilience, and living systems, I returned to a small vineyard in the French Alps with a simple question:
Can a vineyard be rebuilt for the next 100 years?
Chronique of a vineyard that is learning to live like a forest.
What began as a return to the land has become a real-time experiment. As climate, economics, and ecology place increasing pressure on traditional viticulture, I am questioning whether the conventional vineyard model can endure—and what might replace it.
The project involves reducing dependence on machinery, eliminating chemical treatments completely, questionning everything that is done in a vineyard, and transforming it through what I call viti-forestry: integrating hundreds of trees so the vineyard functions less as a monoculture and more as a resilient ecosystem.
Along the way, I draw on four decades spent studying how living systems respond to stress, adapt, and recover. The vineyard has become a laboratory where ideas about health, complexity, resilience, and regeneration meet the realities of soil, climate, and wine.
The North Face of Wine is not a wine review channel.
It is a documentary about rethinking the future of wine—one vineyard, one season, and one experiment at a time.
