Domaine Gauby

The Free Bacchus Story

Gérard Gauby disinfected the soil of his vineyard and then found a hundred dead birds lying in it. He stopped. The domaine has been certified organic since 1996, which in Roussillon at that date made him close to alone.

Roussillon is the hot corner of France, pushed up against the Spanish border, and for most of the last century its name was on heavy, sweet, high-alcohol wine. Gauby’s are the other thing entirely. The vines sit high above Calce on schist and limestone where the nights turn cold, the yields are very small, and the wine comes out lean and savoury rather than jammy — old Carignan and Grenache, the grapes the region spent thirty years pulling out.

The clearest measure of the place is how little of it is planted. Of roughly eighty-five hectares, only about half carries vines. The rest is meadow, oak scrub and woodland kept that way deliberately, with almond and olive trees set between the rows to break the wind and bring the birds back.

Biodynamic methods have been used here since the early 2000s without a certificate ever being sought. The organic certification is the one that can be checked in a registry, so it is the one we claim.