Our Philosophy at Domaine du Météore
In the vineyard,
We strive to get the best out of our exceptional terroir by cultivating our vines in a way that respects life and the environment:
We have planted after the 2022 harvest, one row out of two in our vines, the objectives of this operation are multiple. One of the effects of the growth of faba beans is a strong competition with invasive plants that sometimes come to us from other countries such as the Cape ragwort, this allows us to reduce the passage of ploughing and therefore less compaction of the soil and less fuel burned. We chose the faba bean which is a leguminous plant which has the particularity to fix the nitrogen of the area thanks to a symbiosis with a bacterium of the Rhizobium genus at the level of small balls fixed on its roots which we call nodosity. These nodosities develop as the plant grows and we wait until late spring after flowering that these nodosities have developed well and that the plant has fixed a maximum of nitrogen before destroying this plant cover to return the nitrogen to the soil for the vine.
We are already respecting the maximum doses authorized in biodynamic viticulture for vine treatments and we plan to start our conversion soon. We have invested in a new and more precise treatment device that allows us to reduce the doses while being efficient.
We have installed beehives near a vineyard to contribute to a greater biodiversity.
More than 200 shrubs have been planted on the estate and 20 fruit trees planted in the middle of one of our vineyard plots that we no longer plow.
In the cellar,
As for the work in the cellar, we use less and less oenological products in our wines, no animal-based products, the wines are stabilized with bentonite which is a natural clay. We are experimenting with native yeast fermentation and without sulfites in order to reduce the inputs even more. As far as sulphites in the wines are concerned, we do our best to add as little as possible and we have been rewarded in 2021 by the Vinalies Nationales competition for the Lyrides red wine with the Golden Palm of the best French wine all Appellations combined in the low sulphite category (<10mg/L).