L’ÉPINET 2018 (Jean-Marie CHALAND)

TERROIR

L'ÉPINET is a Chardonnay wine made from around sixty years old vines planted on a place called L'Epinet, where the outcropping soils were formed in the Middle Jurassic, more precisely in the Middle and Upper Bathonian stage, between -167 and -164 million years ago.

During these three million years, Europe was covered by a sea whose variations in level, temperature and hydrodynamics, shaped the current soils of the vineyard plots. The latter consist of a ten meters thick layer of marls rich in Pholadomya; (mollusc living in the sea depths), witness to a sedimentation which took place in deep and calm waters. It covers an important limestone stratum (15-20 meters) comprising white oolithic limestones and reddish clay limestones clay, evidence of a former shallow and rough sea, in a hot

WINEGROWING & WINEMAKING

The grapes, cultivated according to the principles of Organic Agriculture, are picked manually, sorted and fermented with native yeasts. After a very quick alcoholic fermentation for this vintage, the must carries out its malolactic fermentation, then an ageing of 10 months in 5 years old oak barrels, including 10% in new oak barrels, followed by an ageing of 6 months in tank. The wine is neither filtered nor fined.