From Soil to Sip: The Art of Natural Winemaking with Éric Texier of Brézème Vineyards

Fukuoka's natural farming techniques arrive on the vineyard

This is a transcription of our audio interview with Éric Texier, released on October 23rd, 2022. As a transcription, the language can sometimes be a bit difficult to follow, but this fully captures the authentic voices of the speakers.

Brézème vineyards.

Andy:

Éric, thanks so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into winemaking?

Éric:

Well that was a while ago, I'm not sure I remember right, but for sure I was a passionate drinker. I loved drinking wine, discovering wine, and after a few years working for the nuclear industry, I wanted to be outside, to have a different life. So I asked myself what could I do? And there were a few options, and among them winemaking. So I went back to school that was in 93. And I did an internship in Burgundy and after that I decided that it was a good idea. So I started five years later, in 98, first buying grapes and making wine and then, quite fast, I decided to work my own vineyards because I was not very pleased with what I could get in terms of farming practices from the people I bought the grapes from. So, yeah, 2001, I started to farm by myself in a tiny little place in the northern run called Brézème. So that was the beginning of the story.

Andy:

One of the things that stands out about you is your land management practices. You've mentioned in interviews that Masanobu Fukuoka was an influence on your practices and I kind of want to wonder how is that taken in terms of the wine industry when you started doing this, because wine vineyards are so meticulous about sugar content and grapes, and your response was the land knows best. So what was kind of the response to that when you started getting into that?

Éric:

Well, you have to realize that back then so that was more than 20 years ago, almost 30 years ago there were still two kinds of people making wine in France Extremely traditional farmers and more modern farmers, if I can call them farmers and their approach was very, very different. The traditional what I call traditional farmers were practicing vine growing the way it has been done for centuries, so modern approach was not part of the picture for them. Modern approach was not part of the picture for them. They were still farming with very, very frugal means, maybe a tractor, but certainly not like a very modern tractor with very modern tools, certainly not with chemicals. And yeah, I trained with the two kind of these people. So I trained with one that was already 80 years old, so back in 93. So he started growing vines and making wine between the two wars and he was really farming and acting and doing his wines the way it has always been done.

On the other hand, I went to places where people were more modern in their approach so I could decide in a way, what do I want to do? What do I want to do? And by far the traditional approach was very dear to my feelings. I felt much better with these people than the people who trained as winemakers, who practiced, like you know, engineers more than farmers. Yeah, again, I was not the only one around doing what people have been doing for years. So the thing is, my age, at my age, most, like a vast majority of the people would do the modern way. Yeah, so the only thing was that my friends were 40 years older than me, but they, they totally understood what I was doing and uh, of course, because it was their life. So it was not like a cultural shock. We cannot say that. It was more like a relationship, I don't know Parents to kids. I was the kid, they were the parents.

Andy:

It's like going to your grandparents. It's funny how old things become new again. And I think my grandfather; he had a vineyard in southern Italy before we moved to the United States and he would still make wine in the basement. Obviously, he couldn't in New England we couldn't grow the grapes that he had in southern Italy so he would get the juice and or the grapes and he would press it himself with his old press.

When I started making wine myself, you know, as a kid, I didn't really pay attention, I didn't know what he was doing. When I started getting into making my own wine, making my own beer, and I would talk to my dad because my grandfather had passed, and I would say, oh, you know what, do you know what he did for yeast? And he's like, he didn't add any yeast, like, like, it was all-natural, like, and growing up. Today it's almost like you start with the conventional methods of doing things and then you start to learn that that's not traditional.

This is something that's happened in the last 30, 40, 60 years where we don't or we control every aspect of the production line, versus working with nature, letting the wild yeast come in, allowing for the region's flavors to impact what the wine's going to taste like. That was hard as somebody young and like I'm reading all these books and it's like saying you have to do these things, you know, pay attention to all this different stuff, and then the previous generation was just kind of like why you pay attention to it, it's gonna work, and there's a sense of, I think, power involved in that, where people want to have that power over the landscape and giving that power back to the landscape can be really frightening. But also something you probably have experienced is that it's empowering in some ways to have that trust in the landscape that it's going to do the right thing.

Éric:

Absolutely. Again, this is the opposition between farming and and working land and making wine almost as a food, a food processed. Yeah. So the farmers for them, making wine was just like what? 5% of their time, and mostly it was the end of a process that started with pruning and they really didn't pay too much attention to winemaking for itself. It was just the result of nine months of work and if everything was done correctly in the vineyard, then winemaking was just the end of the whole process. It was not a goal by itself.

So, learning from these people for me, I realized later, especially when I came to the US meeting my customers. I realized that winemaking there was like a big thing. I realized that winemaking there was like a big thing, something that seemed very sophisticated and difficult for most of the consumers, which was not the case back then. In France, people wouldn't ask are you using a new oak? People didn't care, they didn't even care about the grapes, as long as it tastes good. For me it was kind of natural to step back into the old school farming and winemaking. Yeah, it was not like a very special move or whatever. I was not rich, I didn't get my vineyard from my family, so there was not like financial pressure behind me. Yeah, yeah, so it was kind of natural to go the easy natural way.

Andy:

Yeah, in some ways, uh, it's the inverse of, like you know, you have this idea of you're going to open a, start a vineyard, and you have to do all these things to do it right, but also taking your hands off of so much of the process. One of the things you've talked about is you've tried a lot of different techniques and some have succeeded and some have failed. So I was curious about, maybe what, what that looks like today. Maybe some of the things you thought would work when you started and you hadn't had a lot of experience, anything that stands out in particular, things have changed.

Éric:

When I started, I would say that we couldn't sense yet the global warming and climate change. My practices, or what I realized I wanted to do as farming practices in the vineyard, were more about ethics. I didn't feel comfortable using herbicides or pesticides because I could realize easily that that was all. These techniques were designed to obtain high yields and big money from the same piece of land and I was not into that. I didn't make wine because I wanted to be a millionaire. I wanted to make wine because it was fun to be outside. I loved the product. So why use all these hardcore techniques if I just needed to make a few thousand bottles of wine, not millions? A few thousand bottles of wine, not millions, if my customers were more interested in the way the wine was made than the price of the wine? So my ecosystem, in a way, was not asking for a financial or yield performance.

I was not pushed by that. Okay, so at the beginning, my main concern was the ethics of not polluting, not killing the soil, not killing the vines, not changing vines every 10 years because they were dying, because too much was asked of them. Time when I realized that maybe it was not just about ethics, but it was also probably about surviving at one point. And then 09, and well, the real beginning was probably 09, when we realized that we had a change in the Northern Rhone— it is not a Mediterranean climate, or it was not. Back then, we had quite a cold winter, a lot of rain, warm and sunny summers, for sure, but not like Sicily.

But starting in 2009, rain started to almost disappear during the growing season, so conditions were drier. Vines showed signs that they were struggling. At one point, what we call hydric stress. We had things that I'd never seen before except in Austria. We had things that I'd never seen before except in Austria it was a sunburn on skins. So after a while, I realized that probably some very traditional techniques that I've been learning from my old school masters back in the 90s were not up to date if I wanted to take into account climate change. So a lot of things that I did for the first 10 years working in the vineyard changed afterwards.

Like when I started farming, plowing was kind of a big thing, especially in the northern part of France. Well, also in the southern part of France. But instead of fighting weeds with chemicals, the traditional way was plowing under the rows but also between the rows, plowing under the rows but also between the rows. And well, 03 was the first time I saw that it was. Usually it was considered that plowing during summer was as beneficial to the vines as watering, in a way. And then in in 03, I realized that, maybe not because I noticed that some vines, after like a very light, superficial plowing, started to show signs that they were a bit under hydric stress, and 09 confirmed that.

So, starting in 09, I decided that I should work on something different than having a clean, totally weeded soil under the rows and between the rows. And so at that point, I started I already started to experiment, but I did a large-scale experiment on growing a cover crop between the rows and not plowing during the dry season. Then I also realized that it was not that simple, that using recipes that I saw in Alsace or Burgundy or in Beaujolais, where people were already doing this kind of practice, it could work sometimes on some places, but it didn't work other times and on other places so that the cover crop thing would be like a huge piece of work to understand exactly what I could do, what I should do, when, how, what plant I should grow. So I started to experiment, with a lot of different things according to the type of soil I had in the vineyards. So that was the first move trying to get rid of the plowing, keeping cover crop between the rows full time.

Andy:

So did that involve trying to find more native plants to cover crop with? Was that more successful?

Éric:

So I worked a while on which plant, on which soil, because I have two different sites on both sides of the road, two different sites on both sides of the Rhone. One is limestone and clay, where the vines are not suffering from hydric stress as bad as on the other side of the Rhone where I have granite-like deep granite, decomposed granite, with no clay, so nothing to retain the moisture. So we started mostly to see the blend of three types of plants in on the limestone, in Brézème, mostly legume, so most of the time like peas, fava, then a grain that could be rye, that could be all type of wheat, different things, and one radish usually, or beetroot.

Andy:

Yeah, get the layers.

Éric:

Yeah, to make a volume of organic manure. Yeah, this worked very well in Brézème, at least until 2018. I could say that we found a very good balance between the cover crop and the vines, but on the granite side it was a very, very different situation, so no way we could keep like well, first it was almost impossible to grow a radish or beetroot there. The soil is too light, so unless you water like crazy, you don't get anything. You get like a few leaves, but you never get like the root.

Then we discovered also that, in terms of legumes, some were doing much better on the on granite than on limestone. Especially lentils, something I don't know the name in english called fevrol (broad beans). It's kind of a fava, but not exactly. It's not used for human food, it's mostly used for animals.

Okay, certain types of fava did much better, and the grain had to be rye. The only thing that would grow was a specific varietal of rye that they grow traditionally in Brittany on granite, so we had to find something to replace the radish and fava, and that took a while before we found a solution. That is kind of a weird solution. It's not a radish or beetroot, it's a flower that does like a rhizome, yeah, like a tuber, and as soon as you cut the flower the rhizome will kind of decompose. And that was the only thing that could survive on the granite long enough to make a root like a big root to make quite a comfortable amount of organic manure. And that was not too tough on the vines after the beginning of the vine growing itself. Yeah, because we found some radish, some kind of Japanese radish that did well in the granite but was too tough. Its demand in terms of water was too tough for the vines after mid-April beginning of May so it took some adjustment.

And then the hardcore global warming heat starting in 2018 and we have to redo it again, so we're working on different types of things. I was direct seeding, I was not plowing for seeding, so I had like quite a heavy cover crop. It's fine on the limestone, but again on the granite, it's more difficult than this. So on the granite now we are experimenting with some grass that you find around the Mediterranean coast, different types of grass that include, like a specific type of mint, thyme, and to do like a very light cover crop with those plants and to seed into it one row out of two and to start again to do some very light, superficial plowing. At the very beginning of July, end of June, and beginning of July, we realized that, to give you an idea, for the nine first months this year in Ardèche we had less than five inches of rain.

Andy:

Oh wow, for the first nine months and you said usually you get about two feet, right?

Éric:

Yeah, yeah. So it's extremely low now during the growing season and we have to be extremely careful with the competition between the cover crop and the vines. Well, at least before we can find solutions on the rootstocks, maybe using rootstocks that are less demanding in terms of water. So we have to work on both sides the vines themselves, but also the cover crop and the soil yeah so this is under process.

It's a big thing for the next 10 years, but we have to reconsider a lot of things. Uh, we have. We have been reconsidering a lot of things. We have, we have been reconsidering a lot of things for the past five, four or five years.

Andy:

I feel like you would think, with the wine industry, where grapes are so sensitive to change, that it would be a hotbed of research for dealing with climate change because it's so quick. My cousin also works in wine in California and she's like you know. The future of California wine is just like it's going to be different than what it is today and in our lifetime. The types of wine, the quality of wines, the hotbeds of where wine comes from all of those things are going to change in the next 20 years. It's really interesting to see that very quick understanding in the wine community, while even in agriculture it doesn't seem to be changing as quickly as a whole, and I think, seeing folks like yourself doing this work, provides a lot of optimism for figuring out some of these solutions where you're seeing it and you're making those changes today, and especially folks like yourself that are working to do it in alignment with nature and nature's needs. I think that's really important.

Maybe changed your thoughts a little bit with climate change going on Maybe changed your thoughts a little bit.

Éric:

Well, by seeding plants, especially legumes and plants that do quite a big volume of roots as soon as they decompose you need to have soil that is really alive, and a huge amount of available food for the vines. We know now that by seeding something like 50 kilos on one hectare of vines uh, 50 kilos of seeds we produce. With the normal rain during the winter we produce something around 10 tons of available organic manure for the vines, which is huge, yeah, so we don't have costs except these seeds. We do not need external input. So we don't use compost, we don't use things like this.

Andy:

I have a follow-up for that because I have heard you talk about uh infusion macerations and it sounds like you don't use those anymore. And what exactly are those?

Éric:

It's one of my winemaking practices. I don't do any punching down or stuff like this. We do a very old technique called marg immerger. It's a submerged cap, so we don't have to use any mechanical means to punch down or stuff like that. And we do like an infusion during the maceration phase Awesome. So this has nothing to do with the farming Gotcha.

Andy:

Yeah, I was like I could see, like I know maceration can be like in fermented products to put back into the soil, so I was really curious what that was. But wine does make a lot more sense.

Éric:

We did products to put back into the soil. So I was really curious what that was. But wine does make a lot more sense. We did we did what we call a liquid compost for the five first years, because most of the vines that I got back then were chemically weeded for years, for 20, 30 years, and the soil was kind of dead for years, for 20, 30 years, and the soil was kind of dead. So to get the decomposition of what we seed for the cover crop, we needed to have like a lot of microbes back in the soil. So we did a lot of different teas what we call also liquid compost to bring back some bacteria and fungus into the soil and after a while, you don't need it anymore. It's my feeling. Okay. So we did this intensively for five years and then from time to time, on young plantations or things like this, we have to do it again. But it's just an occasional thing. We don't have to do it on a regular basis anymore.

Andy:

Yeah, is that something that was traditional, or was that something you kind of learned?

Éric:

Yeah, yeah, that was traditional. Really, it was part of the knowledge of very old, part of the knowledge of very old farmers that were mostly doing farming for themselves, growing their own food with very, very simple means. And, yes, doing this I think the name in English is poison ivy (it is actually stinging nettle).

Andy:

Yeah, poison ivy. (stinging nettle)

Éric:

Yeah, if you use poison ivy (stinging nettle), if you ferment it, if you use it in a liquid and you ferment it for a while with aeration, you get something extremely alive, full of bacteria and fungus, and it's extremely efficient to spray it on the ground to bring back life in the soil. And this was a very traditional technique in small legume gardens for small farmers.

Andy:

Oh wow, Never heard of that.

Éric:

So this kind of thing is very, very easy to do. You just have to cut the plants in your garden and do the fermentation for a few weeks, to do aeration every morning for three, or four weeks and you get something extremely efficient and powerful for bringing back some nitrogen and microbes into the soil.

Andy:

What's that called in French? Purin d'ortie (nettle compost). I'm going to have to look that up later.

Éric:

Purin is very common in traditional farming means fermenting things. So you ferment weeds, herbs, you ferment even cow shit. You ferment things like this just to bring a lot of microbes into it and then you spray it. So it's just a vector for microbes. So purin is a very, very traditional way of doing things in gardens.

Andy:

So I've heard of that process from other parts of the world. I didn't know that it was also common traditionally in France. Something kind of interesting about where you are, you're in a very old part of France that was kind of forgotten as a winemaking country. You've been there for a bit now and it's kind of come back. And, interestingly, it's coming back as climate change is forcing the way we've grown grapes to change, and what the ideal you know, as we call it, the ideal zone for growing grapes is also changing. So I'm a little bit interested to know why you chose where you are and if you're starting to see other people around you changing their methods to more similar to what you're doing more similar to what you're doing.

Éric:

Well, honestly, I didn't choose this place for climate consideration. Well, not exactly. So I'm not like a big wine guy. Okay, I don't drink. 15.5% of alcohol wines, it's not my thing. A half percent of alcohol wines, it's not my thing. I'm more regular guy, uh, but probably not a chateauneuf-du-pap guy.

So, uh, northern Rhone for me was kind of a very interesting part of France because they had two specific grapes syrah. Well, not only two, two for me, but very specific local grapes, syrah, which is the local grape in the Northern Rhone. I know that Syrah is all over the planet now, but Syrah is originating in the Northern Rhone, and also, for me, Roussanne. And so I wanted to make mono-varietal wines.

I was more interested in terroir expression, and as terroir expression is concerned, usually at least when you were trained in Burgundy you have the conviction that to express terroir in a very deep way, you need only one grape, the good one at a good place, but only one. Yeah, because as soon as you start blending grapes, you could have a huge impact on the style of the wine. And so where is the terroir? You never know, unless you do the exact same blender. You never know. Unless you do the exact same blend, you never know. So I wanted to grow in a in a place where there was only a very few grapes and one grape per wine. Northern Rhone back then was a quite unknown place, Brézème specifically. It had almost disappeared, and there were opportunities there that I couldn't find, like in Burgundy or in Champagne, no way.

So it was a decent place for me because land was available, still a lot of old school growers I could learn from, uh, unlike Bordeaux for sure yeah so, yeah, northern one was uh, but it could have been Beaujolais, honestly, yeah, yeah, well, still, I decided to go for northern Rhone especially, especially Brézème, because in the Northern Rhône we mostly have a primary type of soil, so granite and schist, and very few limestone, and Brézème is a place where everything is about limestone. So I had the climate of the Northern Rhône, so continental climate, very cold winters, hot summers, with the soil that you never find in this place. So for me, it was like a unicorn terroir where I could try to achieve some kind of Burgundian Rhône wines. That was the idea at first. Then global warming came, climate change and, of course, being on limestone and clay is a much better choice now than being on granite.

Andy:

I'm assuming that a lot of the farmers that were there when you started are not there anymore.

Éric: Of course. Since they're old or they were older.

Andy: Are you seeing people move into these farms and these vineyards managing them traditionally, or did they come with new techniques and maybe with climate change they're reconsidering? Or I've spoken, actually, with someone over in France, Dr. Kefuss, who is a natural beekeeper actually over in France, and he was talking about how people over there are much more open to treatment-free beekeeping because they've seen his successes. And I'm curious if you're kind of seeing that same thing.

Éric:

No for sure. First, the thing that is happening now, especially in Ardèche. Now, especially in Ardèche, a lot of people who farmed for the past 40 years have no one to take over. So it's mostly young kids who are coming, and they don't come to do industrial farming. They come to do as natural as possible farming and winemaking, by the way, but it's true also for a lot of different types of farming than vine growing.

So there is a young generation, mostly in their 30s, who are coming and so they are doing things very traditionally, I would say, but with a very new approach based on the impact of climate change. So they don't use robots, so it's not a high-tech thing but also they don't use watering because they realize that it's kind of nonsense. Maybe it's the solution for now because we still have a bit of water available, but for sure, 10 years or 20 years from now it's not going to be a solution. For these young people, solving problems for a short period of time is absolutely not a solution. So they are working in a traditional way with a very new approach. So typically they won't replant, like in ardash.

A lot of young people are not replanting traditional grapes on traditional rootstocks, because they do believe they are right that it's it's the end. Growing Syrah on granite, on steep slopes south facing it's going to work maybe for 10 more years, but it's the end of it. So they are doing it traditionally. So they are doing traditionally, but definitely, they are introducing new or very old varietals that nobody would grow anymore for the past 50 years. They are, you know, digging into rootstock libraries to find rootstocks that were known for being extremely resistant to drought.

Andy:

So a new approach and a traditional way of doing things. That's awesome. It sounds like you're pretty optimistic about the future of the region and these traditional practices.

Éric:

You know, I'm an old man now and so it's new. I don't work in my vineyards anymore, except for a few things, especially prospective, but otherwise, it's my kids' generation who is in charge now with farming, and so I'm surrounded by kids I'm almost the old white male, you know, and it's around me, it's all young people, young women, full of enthusiasts, very well trained, very well, I guess. Being in contact with this new generation of people who have, I mean, understand clearly what the problem will be in the future, the problem will be in the future. So, yes, it makes me uh kind of optimistic, because they are definitely not my generation with all these certitudes that we had. I hope it will be enough.

Andy:

Well, so no, I'm, I hope it will be enough I appreciate it as someone who's in their 30s and is um trying to reconnect with this. Here in the US, I think a lot of it is brushed off as naive kids who don't know what they're doing. So to hear from someone else overseas that sure they may be naive and they may be doing things kind of weirdly, but they're going in and they're trying to figure it out and there's a lot of value in that. To get back to your wine, which we haven't talked too much about, you guys sell internationally, so I know a couple of places near me carry it. Any particular years, or varieties that you would recommend if somebody is not super into wine but wants to try some of this organic beyond organic wine, you would recommend?

Éric:

First, there are two ways of drinking wine in my mind. I would say a traditional European way, kind of intellectual, so based on history. So probably the perfect example of these wines is Burgundy. So to enjoy a bottle of burgundy, you need to know who made the wine. Where does it come from? Where specifically does it come from? And it's not like a mile away, it's like a few meters away because one bottle can cost thousands of euros or dollars just because it's 10 meters away from another one that is 50 euros. So this is a very specific way to enjoy wine and I do enjoy this type of wine and this type of drinking.

And of course, for this kind of thing, I think terroir-driven wines are very interesting. So I do have a few very terroir-driven wines, usually one varietal like I said before, and for me, it's either Syrah for the reds or Roussan for the whites, and I do it on the two terroirs. So the granite part, saint-julien-saint-alban, and the limestone part, Brézème. So you can always compare when I make wine, you can always compare what the impact of terroir will be because it's only one varietal, it's made the same way, with very few interventions and no additives, and so the main difference is beyond my will, it's the place. So for people who are into this kind of thing drinking also culture in a way and history, I would say that the Syrah-driven wines that I made are the best to understand what is terroir and what is my aim as a terroir-driven winemaker. Then there is also another way to drink wine, and this is also a way that I love a lot. It's drinking wine just because it's joyful, funny, because it makes you laugh with your friends, and these are wines you don't want to have to think about the terroir, the place, the grape, the way it's made.

In this, I try to make a few wines like this, especially Chafu and Adèle, which are two blends. The Adèle is only one varietal, it's now only one varietal Claret and the Chafou is a blend of Saint-Saëns, a bit of Grenache still, and a bit of white also. So it's a red wine with 20% of white grapes in it, and these wines are made for a party. I mean, you know, joy, music, casual drinking, yeah, exactly.

So it's a very different type of approach, except for farming, where we do exactly the same thing. Then the winemaking is absolutely different, of course, the aging also. And again, when I make a bottle of Brézème, I want the people to be able to taste my place, to taste the vintage. How was it? Was it rainy, was it tough, was it easy? And this must show in a terroir-driven wine. Yeah, when I make a bottle of chafu, it's totally different story. I want people to have a good time, uh, not to think too much. I would.

I would easily uh, do some kind of tricks to give the wine this type of style instead of showing the terroir. One example is I'm not like a carbonic maceration huge fan. But for the Chafou, like in 2021, we had like a difficult year with a lot of disease, a lot of rain. If I had made the wine extremely traditionally, it would have been probably too austere.

So I used quite a bit of carbonic maceration this time to make a joyful wine. So as soon as I use this kind of trick which is not an additive, don't get me wrong, it's only grapes but if I use carbonic maceration to a certain amount in a wine like chafu, then I will kill a few information from the vintage of the terroir. I will make it the way it is because it makes me please, but by doing so, I consider that I'm killing a bit of information, erasing a bit of information from the terror of the vintage, but the result is joyful enough, so people can pardon me to go that way I think they will.

Andy:

I'm not very knowledgeable about wines. I enjoy good wine, but one of the things that are particularly valuable to me in that enjoyment is understanding that the wine is an encapsulated place in time that can never be replicated again, of course, and that is the beautiful part of it, because you inherently, in drinking it, are respecting that moment because it'll never come again, and that part of the wine, I think here in the United States is not as enjoyed as much, but I do feel like it is coming back and that is beautiful and I as a drinker, appreciate the work that you folks like yourself put into the process appreciate the work that you folks like yourself put into the process.

Éric:

I really enjoy the fact that when people make me drink my wine somewhere I don't know, in Iowa, the wine that I bottled like 10 years ago it's not my wine anymore because some people some way at one point moved this bottle from one place to another to carry it, so this bottle won’t be the same than the one that stayed at my home yeah so in a bottle of wine there can be also a huge amount of the consumer input.

Andy:

Yeah, I've never thought of that.

Éric:

By attention, by passion, by you know something really deep and for sure, if we compare these two bottles, one that I kept at my place in my cellar and the same bottle of wine that went through different places, boats, trucks to Iowa, the result is not the same. So everybody has, like you know, doing something for this bottle of wine. Yeah, and the result has to be different.

Andy:

I like this idea a lot yeah, that that's a beautiful way to understand it. Yeah, Éric, this has been a fantastic, really enjoyable conversation. I feel like I learned a ton about wine and I'm a bit more optimistic for the future, and I appreciate that. If you're ever in Boston, you'll have to let me know and we'll grab a bottle of wine together, oh sure.

Éric:

I will, and if you come to Charnay, don't hesitate, you can stay here.

Andy:

Right, I appreciate that.

Learn more about Éric’s wines by visiting: https://www.eric-texier.com/