🕷️ Domaine de l’Épeire 🕷️

The winemaker is a man named Philippe Petit. Philippe is a native son of the French Catalan country, and the remarkable village of Calce in particular. For the past 25 years, Philippe has worked the vineyards of Calce. Working for a major co-op, Philippe knows this unique place as well as anyone, and brings to it his own spirit of viticultural enginuity and curiosity. He's responsible for bringing natural practices to countless vineyards, utilizing the biodynamic method, and relying on a keen understanding of the variegated soil types that make Calce what it is. 

     Hundreds of millions of years ago, tectonic plates collided and abbuted each other (rather than sublimating one another) to form the striated landscape where Calce sits today. As a result, a multitude of bedrocks run like pinstripes over the land, cleanly diveded in strata of the Earths jutting plate. Philippe is a quiet, serious, cartographer of this beautiful mosaic. In 2019, he took just 3 hectares of his own to start this new domaine with the express purpose of pairing a single grape variety with a single bedrock to make his cuvées. I love just about all the natural producers from this small village, but Philippe's have a structure and clarity that, for me, speaks to his intimate relationship to this place. There are no simpler connections to this awesome place than through the wines I've tasted with Philippe.