Producer Château Sainte-Anne

FRANCE, PROVENCE

We are in Bandol, the most authoritative appellation in all of charming Provence, overlooking the Mediterranean, between Marseille and Toulon. It was in 1840 that one of François Dutheil de la Rochère's ancestors bought the current estate in the Pères de l'Oratoire district of Sainte-Anne d’Évenos. In 1964 François Dutheil decided to try his hand at viticulture, joined by his wife Françoise 13 years later. When her husband passed away in 1997, she did not have the slightest hesitation in continuing the business alone. Since 2010 Jean-Baptiste, Françoise's son, has taken the helm of the company. Today 14 of the total 65 hectares of the estate are planted with vines: 11 produce Bandol and 3 Côtes-de-Provence. There are 10 plots in all, all facing north-east and located in the territory of Évenos, at an altitude between 80 and 200 meters above sea level. The clayey-calcareous soil is among the most sandy and draining of the whole denomination. Thanks to an amphitheater conformation, the microclimate of the site is particularly cool. All around the vines, the vegetation exhibits its diversity: Mediterranean scrub, pines of various species, cedars, palms, oranges, almond trees, olive trees, cypresses, mimosas, white gorse and junipers. The agronomic approach has been organic since 1992 (Écocert certification); all the grapes are produced on the farm, without external purchases. In the cellar, simple solutions are adopted, far from hyper-technological. Cooling of the tanks by external water runoff, indigenous yeasts and bacteria for fermentation, static decaying, very measured use of sulphites. A methodology that allows the terroir, its richness and the immediacy of the wine to be expressed, thanks to the qualitative potential of the vines and the place, whether it be reds, rosés or whites