Le Domaine des Terres Falmet , propriété d'Yves Falmet est situé dans les montagnes du Languedoc sur le terroir de Saint-Chinian. He has created his own wine estate the hard way: he studied bio-chemistry and he has worked in wineries all over the world - from his home region of Champagne (where he grew up on a farm!) to Germany, California, and New Zealand. In 1996 he bought 20 hectares of north-f
acing vineyards in the beautiful Languedoc region, some of which had been abandoned by the previous owner and shunned by neighbors. He added a tiny cellar in nearby Creissan in 2001. On his limestone-crested slope, it has been tough work! But Yves saw the potential of the site and the old vines and is making splendid, fairly-priced wines. Yves prefers spraying only twice a year with fungicides against odium, rather than spraying much more often with the copper and sulfur permitted by the "organic" practice. His varietal, Saint-Chinian, is a blend of 40% Mourvedre, 30% Grenache and 30% Syrah, unoaked, from vines averaging 60 years of age. He calls it L'Ivresse des Cimes, which is a nice pun - you could translate it literally as "drunkenness of the peaks," but in French it really means mountain sickness, which makes sense as the grapes come from a very steep vineyard near the ridge, on calcareous soils.
