Domaine Curtet
Marie & Florian Curtet
Serrières-en-Chautagne

Marie and Florian met one summer by chance. Florian was working for Jacques Maillet, the previous owner of their estate, and Marie was working for Gilles Berlioz, one of the most renowned growers of the Savoie. Marie was giving Jacques Maillet an extra hand during harvest one year, met “Flo,” as she affectionately calls him, and the rest was history.

Jacques Maillet contracted cancer in the early 1990s, which was attributed to the various chemicals he had been handling at the estate where he worked at the time. He fought back from the disease and was given a second shot at life, and as such was determined to find a way to work that did not involve chemicals. This led him to discover biodynamics, and thus his estate was managed “Autrement” (French for “a different way”). This remains the name of two of the Curtets’ cuvées, as a nod to the history of the estate and to the shared notion of working in this way.

In 2016, it was time for Jacques to retire, and so the duo decided to pour their life savings into the estate to take it over as their own.

In the two vineyard plots that he works, Curtet has planted or grafted a massale selection of Jacquere that he has gathered from what he considers all the best sites in the Savoie, along with a number of other white varieties including Gringet, Altesse, Mondeuse Blanche, Molette, and Savagnin, many of which will be harvested for the first time in 2021. These are all planted in a 7.4-acre vineyard named Le Cellier des Pauvres (The Cellar of the Poor). In a 4.9 acre vineyard named Les Vignes de Seigneur (The Vineyard of the Lord), he also has some very old Mondeuse (a number of vines more than 100 years old) as well as Gamay and Pinot Noir.

From Marie and Florian:
”Over the past few years, we have initiated changes towards a wilder, freer and more diversified “culture”. Here is a small anthology of our personal satisfactions for the past year and our current and future projects.

Our interactions with crops are now limited to pruning, sowing, planting, picking and harvesting. We had the intuition to be sometimes in the interference with the plant, in the dirigisme, and that did not seem to us completely founded but rather inherited from a questionable cultural baggage. Little by little we learn to refrain from acting. What freedom found for the plants, but also for us!

We lived as a contradiction in the fact of seeking purity in the cellar but still using the tractor (therefore oil) and treatments (certainly organic) in the vineyards. We have significantly reduced our dependence on a system that does not suit us. Not a liter of fuel, not a gram of treatment and fertilizer used to cultivate this year. We are immensely satisfied to have experienced this possibility. Our 2022 vintage will therefore be our first pure vintage, from the vine to the cellar. A small harvest but what satisfaction! We have thus implemented our deep convictions: the vine does not need to suffer or be treated to water us. It now seems unthinkable to us to backtrack. Trees are taking up more and more space in our cultures. Whether it is fruit, fodder, shade or support for a vine, tomorrow it will mainly be a food crop. From the vine to the olive tree, from the apple tree to the cereals, the plots where we only grew grapes yesterday, tomorrow we will also provide oil, flour, juice, ciders...

We continue to diversify beyond the tree and have grown different cereals: Chautagne rye, ancient wheat, millets from peasant seeds. Our challenge is to self-produce our cereals between friends and neighbors, to cultivate them, harvest them, transform them manually without oil or electricity. A bread oven is planned near the cellar to combine food autonomy and conviviality.

Between the urgency of finding solutions for tomorrow and the acceptance of the slowness of living processes, all these small steps allow us to feel in our rightful place. A place where man is part of nature and his main concern is to do no harm.