Surface
3Ha
Domain
Story
Thomas is a native from the region, his family owned the land since 1652. He started audiovisual and cinema studies, and meanwhile he worked in the caves cooperatives. He did his first harvests with Eric Pfifferling from l’Anglore and he discovered natural wines because of him. He did 5 / 6 seasons with him.
Then, he found a job in audiovisual and worked there for 9 years. He still visited natural wine fairs, and finally grew tired of computers and decided to go back to the land and start his own domain.
He has made micro-cuvées since 2016, but began commercializing his wines in 2019. Since 2018 he’s been planting vines, including cinsault, mourvèdre, and syrah.
His first micro-cuvee, Hibiscus, represented 1000 bottles. He didn’t sell them, and instead used them as transaction items in exchange of various services.
From 2020 he got all the remaining lands from his father, and vinified 3 cuvees. He also started to grow fruits and cereals (olive trees, apricot trees, sunflower, einkorn).
In 2021, he already had 7 cuvees, for a total of 9000 bottles.
Agriculture
Thomas likes his vineyards with a maximum grass cover. He uses a small tractor to plow.
Treatments on the vines are all natural, like for example nettle manure.
He uses a vertical press from the 1950s, and conducts slow presses of 6-7 hours. He works out of a tiny cellar space in his ancient family abode, but is seeking a larger premises in Sanilhac or nearby.
Being friends with Ad Vinum’s Sébastien Chatillon, they work collaboratively to farm their vines together.
Vinification
Vinification is additive-free, and wines see no sulfite addition, no fining, and no filtration. Aging is conducted in used barrel and tank, depending on the cuvée.
Like his friends Chatillon and Valentin Vallès, Bouet often includes portions of direct-press juice in his red wines.
Thomas uses the “pied de cuve” technique, which consists of putting 3 crates of grapes for fermentation 10 days before harvest, and then use this base in the tanks to develop indigeneous yeasts quickier.
After the harvest, he waits one night, and then checks to see if everything’s alright, if not he adds some additional yeast in the tank.
It has been his way of doing things for 3 years now.
He learned this technique from an oenologue with whom he worked at a domain earlier in his winemaker journey.