Making wine and living in an old stony Dordogne house...

Sounds like every new yorker's alternate life dream. Tucked off a beaten path in between Libourne and Bergerac, that is exactly what Aude Duval and Sylvain Ohayon are doing in the village of Port-Sainte-Foy-et-Ponchapt in Dordogne, 90min east of the city of Bordeaux.

As soon as I tasted my first bottle of Pèlroge, Onesta and Réjane back in 2019, I knew I wanted to meet them. Wines were so pure, so alive yet precise, clean, serious, well crafted. Very terroir driven, elegant, southwest in fact but with a little edge and freshness that I rarely find in bottles from that region.

We are stoked to have Aude and Sylvain join our little family.

-Basile

Before arriving at the vineyard in 2017, Sylvain was winemaker in the Médoc and Aude worked in a wine store close to Saint Emilion. Their paths crossed on the Argentinian viticultural lands at the foothills of the Andes Cordillera. Hailing from the Bordeaux region and Corrèze, they had travelled far to discover wines from another continent. L'Astré is the living project of their meeting and their shared passion.
They grow grapes on the border between Dordogne and Gironde in what is commonly called the Périgord Pourpre. The vines flourish on a limestone cliff in a hilly landscape at an altitude of 80 meters above the Dordogne valley, protected by a forest.

The vineyard counts 8 hectares in a set area on a clay-limestone soil: 1.70 ha of Sémillon + 6.20 ha of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The vines are 35 years old on average. Planting density is 5000 vines per hectare.

The winery has been in organic farming since 2012, Sylvain and Aude have chosen to accentuate this orientation by implementing a biodynamic approach.