A visit to the winery Domaine Olivier Pithon that Olivier founded in 2001. He originally comes from the Layon region in the Loire Valley but settled in Roussillon to make wine.
He came to the Calce village to taste the wines of Gerard Gauby, one of the leaders in new French winemaking. He tasted, and then he stayed.
Olivier tries to make very personal wines – with a lot of freshness, acidity, and elegance.
He makes white wines using the traditional grape varieties macabeu, grenache blanc and grenache gris. His reds are made with grenache noir, carignan, and a bit of syrah and mourvedre. In this village one can still find vines planted just after the Phylloxera, about one hundred years old!
There is a small group of hard core winemakers with similar philosophies in Calce: Pithon, Matassa, Gauby, Padie,…
Pithon explains how he works with bio-dynamism (which in some ways can be seen as an extreme form of organic vine growing) and what role the plants and herbs play in the biodynamic winegrowing. Biodynamic agriculture (and thence vine growing) was created some hundred years ago by Rudolf Steiner in Germany and not all is necessarily applicable in the Roussillon…
The language is French [F]
[F] Entretien avec le vigneron Olivier Pithon, proprietaire du Domaine Olivier Pithon, une propriete dans le vignoble Roussillonais, une region viticole dans le le sud de la France connu pour ses vins puissants et originels.
