AD FINES - Lubéron

Domaine AdFines - VignArtea

LUBÉRON    2,8 ha    NON CERTIFIED ORGANIC CULTURE    OWNER : Michel ROCHER


ESTATE HISTORY


AD FINES is a small vineyard of the Lubéron located in Ménerbes, at the foot of the village classified "plus beaux villages de France". Lost among the woods and hills, the vineyard plots of the domain are concentrated on 2,8 hectares: a "small" vineyard able to produce marvellous wines in limited quantities (9000 bottles). The estate owner is Michel Rocher, a computer specialist and oenophile. In 1994 he acquired these few parcels of land on which he planted vineyards from 1996 until 2001. Three grape varieties enjoy the sunny days of South of France: the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Syrah from “massal selection” (no hybrids) and the Serine, the ancestor of the Syrah, which is called "Syrah with small grains" and of which one can still find some rare plants in Côte-Rôtie, a country it would originate from.

This unique place has an history that dates back several centuries, the history of the "Via Domitia", the oldest french road built around 120 BC by the Romans and linking, for a part, the Alps to the Pyrenees with guesthouses and horse stables marked with stone pillars. In Goult, a neighboring village, an old stone pillar is still a testament to the presence, at the limit of the cities of Cavaillon and Apt, of an old horse stables of the Via Domitia, that the Romans had called Ad Fines ("The border”) and from which Michel Rocher drew inspiration to baptize his domain.



TERROIR


The terroirs which outcrop in the Luberon were shaped from the Upper Cretaceous, 89 million years ago, by the action of water and tectonic movements.

During the Cretaceous period, the sea deposited the sediments that outcrop from the Mont du Lubéron, and then, in the Oligocene period, more than 32 million years later, it extended from Nice to Switzerland, forming lagoon-land deposits. It is also during this period that the recent mountain ranges appear.

In the Miocene, 23 million years ago, the Alps were built in their broad outline, and the marine transgressions took place in a depression known as the "peri-Alpine depression", between the Alps and the Massif Central. The Avignon basin area is then dotted with islands and shoals that delimit several basins. The sedimentation is then characterised by a succession of deposit sequences which testify to marine transgressive movements sometimes dominated by the tides, sometimes by fair weather or storm waves.

It is on these Miocene deposits, composed of molasses and dated more precisely to the Burdigalian period, between -20 and -16 million years ago, that the vineyard of the AD FINES estate rests: the sea had then invaded the Rhône Valley by depositing numerous sandy and sandstone sediments. These molasses are essentially detrital sedimentary rocks, ideal for vines: they are soft and therefore favour the rooting of the vines, and they are permeable, so they constitute a continuous source of water that is extremely precious for the plants.



WINEGROWING & WINEMAKING


Michel Rocher has only one goal: to produce pleasant wines of high quality. For this, the vines have obviously to be grown in the respect of the environnment. Even if the bottles do not have any label of organic certification, the plants are treated in the most natural way possible. Not a single drop of chemistry falls on this magnificent terroir that are the calcareous hills of Heyrauds.

The grapes are harvested manually and each plot and variety is made separately. The fermentation takes place under the action of indigenous yeasts with a maceration of 3 to 5 weeks. The wine is aged in young Burgundy barrels of one or two wines for the Serine and Cabernet Sauvignon, and in old Burgundy barrels of several wines for the Syrah. The duration of the ageing process varies between 12 and 18 months.

3000 of the 9000 bottles produced are deliberately stored in the estate cellar for a long ageing in order to be able to offer old vintages, for our greatest pleasure!


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