The “complantation”, an ancestral method, a preserved method in Roussillon.
One of the specificities of the Banyuls cru and shared in Roussillon, is the planting of several grape varieties on the same plot.
This ancient practice dates back to a time when grape varieties were not as important as they are today and it was very natural for a winegrower in past centuries to replace the dead strains of a vine with plants of a different variety than the one planted on the said parcel.
Rarely was a plot of land completely uprooted and what is now called “massale selection” of vines that were no longer old because they were composed of very old and more recent strains planted to replace the “missing” ones.
We have maintained this method of cultivation at Domaine Augustin & La Préceptorie.
This means that during the harvest, we have to make several passes to harvest, for example, first, the Grenaches gris to make white Collioures or white Côtes du Roussillon at the end of August, then ten days later, on the same plot, black Grenaches to make red Collioure or red Côtes du Roussillon.
This “segmentation” of the harvest corresponds to a distribution of production and obliges us to the distribution of marketing.
Unlike other estates, in other vintages, we did not choose our vineyard, our grape varieties; we wanted to preserve an old vineyard that only produced traditional Banyuls or Maury twenty years ago by making it “speak” differently today through the exposure and altitude of these parcels vinified in different ways.
We did not choose to plant this or that grape variety after a market study to make a type of wine adapted to this market.
Therefore, our distributor customers can support us in our approach only on the condition that they like the wines and that they share the same cultural requirements in order to maintain this anachronistic vineyard as it is, by marketing and consuming the wines, all the wines produced, whether they are white, red or mutated.
For this reason, we cannot meet the demand of those who would be content to buy only white wines from us at the expense of everything else: the volumes of white wines made available to our customers can only be proportional to those withdrawn in red.