Collection "Art et Essai".

“I wanted to respect the ancestral know-how by sophisticating this noble wine, come from passerillés grapes and matured in barrels. This wine talk patois, it is powerful, with lime and hazelnut aromas with a dash of walnut. We don't have to normalize such a wine”.

Midday start without a warn. A little low beside, in La Caunette village, hang on the “ La Cesse ” canyon, a property with a comical name: le Chateau Coupe Roses.

To Françoise Le Calvez and Pascal Frissant's place, in front of a glass of this wine come from extremes grape harvest according to occitan method , we understand that the meaning of this nectar go to past comments for oenologist buff.

Before all, says Pascal Frissant, to make a success of those wines, we need good ground and good exposure.

And to support equinox rain, the vine must be perfectly maintained.

No fertilizer, a big mass of old wood, deep roots, berries well-exposed to the sun. As you can see, that's the antithesis of productivism”.

Those notions serve as banners to all good wine grower who purchase Excellency. In Alsace or in La Loire , the best of them got the ear of all. In the Languedoc , Pascal Frissant contributes to introduce all those ideas.

In 1990, he creates Béziers-Oenopole. There, we talk about everything. Even about wines in sacred texts and the Mediterranean culture.

(Contributions are published are published by wines international office editions).

During a seminar about the management ground, Claude Bourguignon, the agronomist who gave a scientific credibility to the biological approach, have full house.

About 300 wine growers get out of the seminar, asserting that they have been told lies during fifty years. We finally understand that we need to end with this crazy idea that considers the ground as an inert substratum which needs to be on a drip.

Understand our story: the Midi wine has been the first food processing industry field in France .

Particularly with co-ops. Came from anarchy trade unionism, they have promoted a secular attitude, republican and positivist. And so, an acceptance of modernity, which most visible sign, is the transfer to French and the abandonment of the Occitan, family-language, a bit disgraceful.

Likewise we took ourselves away from the only family know-how's concerning sweet wines (our whites), that old men doll up in secret, without daring to hand on their recipes.

In 1995, Béziers-Oenopole disappeared. At the end of disrupting habits, this forum annoyed the good old southern institutions, political ones or wine growing.

Pascal Frissant went back to his vines, from where he keeps on observing the world.

“I went to Morocco to make vines. And this year, I'm testing an incredible experience; I'm going to an Indian vineyard of 1000 hectares , at 300 kms from Bombay . Here, I'm still convince that our noble wines will have a great future. That's an old story; since wine growers exist, they have always tried to go as far as possible, to pull up the best of Nature.”

Michel Bessières