“If with wine you want to make a small fortune, start with a big one”

I am a winemaker by training (Beaune, France and Geisenheim, Germany), but I always kept in mind the famous saying: “If with wine you want to make a small fortune, start with a big one”. 

With that in mind, I always made wine on the side during my stays abroad (Stellenbosch/ South Africa, Napa Valley, Loire Valley) but made a living with ‘peripheral’ products, related to the wine industry: enzymes, yeast, bottles, corks, etc.

Many of the home-made, small-batch wines I made were OK (and sometimes not), generally good enough for personal consumption, but nothing more than that. However, in the last few years I have been trying to make small-batch wines, giving everything I have, paying attention to all the details.

So why the website? Why the effort? Well, not selling the wine allows me to blabber about things like wine pricing and scarcity, about the relation between wine price and wine quality and about alternative (i.e. non-commercial) ways for you to taste my wine because some people do manage to get hold of a bottle)

And in case you are interested, here you can read how the wine is made.

And here you can read the Tasting Notes for the 2 vintages that exits.

Originally, I was working on a plan to create a micro-winery based on five small vineyard plots (total 3 ha) with five different red grape varieties. But soon it became clear to me that instead of enjoying the grape growing and the wine making, I would be swamped and frustrated by the amount of paperwork that is required by the French state. So, I decided for the “reduced”, simplified option.

Now I am doing exactly what I want: make a few hundred bottles of wine for personal/family consumption. One grape variety only: the noble Syrah. No marketing or selling of the wine. No online ordering, no commercial activities.