From Selection Massale: “We were farmers before we were vignerons” Pierre-Andre and Anne Deplaude like to say with no small measure of pride. It’s often said that wines are made in the vineyard, not in the winery. This is of course a simplification but we’ve always liked working with those vignerons with big callused hands from the field, so imagine how happy when we stumbled on wines being made by people in love with the idea of polyculture; that wine was just a part of their farm.

When Pierre-Andre and Anne started to farm in the out of the way Coteaux-Du-Gier somewhere between Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand, wine wasn’t a priority - instead it was grains, fruits and dairy cows, as well as a tiny production of wines. This kept going until the early 2000s when a drop in milk prices forced them to rethink a few things, and they decided to take some of their most interesting land and convert it to vineyards. The rest, as they say, is history. And the wines are some of our favorites to this day.