[F] Domaine O Pithon, Roussillonhttp://www.bkwine.com/wine_tours/wine_tours.htm --- A visit to the winery Domaine Olivier Pithon that Olivier founded in 2001. He originally comes from the Layon region in the Loire Valley but settled in Roussillon to make wine.
He came to the Calce village to taste the wines of Gerard Gauby, one of the leaders in new French winemaking. He tasted, and then he stayed.
Olivier tries to make very personal wines - with a lot of freshness, acidity, and elegance.
He makes white wines using the traditional grape varieties macabeu, grenache blanc and grenache gris. His reds are made with grenache noir, carignan, and a bit of syrah and mourvedre. In this village one can still find vines planted just after the Phylloxera, about one hundred years old!
There is a small group of hard core winemakers with similar philosophies in Calce: Pithon, Matassa, Gauby, Padie,...
Pithon explains how he works with bio-dynamism (which in some ways can be seen as an extreme form of organic vine growing) and...