Domaine Bergeville

The Free Bacchus Story

Eve Rainville and Marc Théberge saved for a vineyard for years before they had one. The dream started in Vancouver, Rainville says, when she worked as a statistician and he as an engineer, and it followed them through Ottawa, Maryland and England. In 2008 they bought a meadow at Hatley in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Bergeville joins the ends of their two surnames.

Quebec is a hard place to grow grapes. Here winter falls to minus 30°C and summer climbs to 30°C, so Bergeville grows mostly hybrid varieties, crosses between European wine grapes and North American vines, with names like St-Pépin, Frontenac and Acadie. They ripen with very high acidity. Rainville’s point is that this is a problem for still wine and an asset for sparkling, so the couple set out to make bubbles by the traditional method used in Champagne, with the second fermentation in the bottle. In winter the vines are covered with geotextile.

They applied for organic and biodynamic certification as soon as they began planting, so the vines have never had a synthetic pesticide. Ecocert Canada has certified the domaine’s wines and grapes since 2011, and Demeter Canada lists it as a certified biodynamic farm. The first bottles went on sale in 2014, 2,500 of them. By 2025 the domaine was making 80,000.

Le Blanc is the flagship. Since 2021 it has had only 4 grams of sugar added per litre, and it was chosen as the official sparkling wine of the SAQ’s 100th birthday, under the name L’Effervescent. The couple also put some wine in recyclable cans made in Quebec, to cut the heavy imported glass that sparkling wine needs, and a can holds two glasses. In the domaine’s own shop, the four wines of its Atelier range (Colfo, Amourette, Amourette rosée and Et si on allait sur la lune) carry no organic attribute; every other wine there is listed as biologique, the French word for organic. And in 2020 the SAQ reported that the domaine was also buying grapes from a partner vineyard.