Since the 16 th century, our ancestors have been growing grapes in the village of Le Perréon.
The oldest house in our village (16th century) was built by the Perréon family (our mother’s family name is Perréon). Our parents are now living in that building.
During the centuries, our ancestors have been working very hard to expand the estate and to pass it through to the next generation.
The last member of a large dynasty named Perréon (same name as the village), Marie Odette (our mother) married Jean Marie Bererd (our father). Jean Marie is a son and grand son of vintners also from Le Perréon. In the sixties, the estate owned 12 vine planted hectares, at this period the young couple decide to sell bottled wine.
At the end of the eighties, their 3 sons (Bruno, Olivier and Frederic) started to work with their parents. They now share all the work and the responsibilities of viticulture, wine making and wine marketing.
In the last 25 years, the estate and the wine-selling have grown slowly to 29 hectares and 180000 bottles per year. Huge efforts are made to improve wine making: temperature controlled fermentation, pneumatic press, juice concentration equipment …
Our winemaking references are more in Burgundy than in Beaujolais.
Our estate is located in the heart of Beaujolais in the Beaujolais Villages area. The vineyard spreads over 29 ha on the territory of 2 communes:
Le Perréon and Vaux en Beaujolais (well known as Clochemerle).
Our estate divides into 70 small plots of different exposures, ages and altitudes (between 300 and 550 m). This provides a huge advantage: this diversity of micro-terroirs gives our wines a greater complexity.
2 grape varieties are planted:
– Gamay Noir is planted mainly on the south facing slopes. The shallow granite soils of our estate are very sandy with a lot of small stones.
The granite soils are the best for the blossoming of our grape variety.
Our vines are growing on steep slopes, it’s an advantage to produce riper grapes but it needs much more manual labour.
The average age of our vines is 40 years though some of them existed already more than a century ago.
– Chardonnay is planted on the northern facing slopes of the domaine where the soils are more clayey.
In the course of the year, we do a lot of manual labour, using ancestral and modern techniques to produce healthy and very ripe bunches.
We prune severely using small spurs considering the fruitfulness of the grape variety.
The Chardonnay is cane pruned with 8 nodes (as our colleagues from Burgundy do).
Shoot thinning can occur if necessary, we leave 750 g to 1 kg of grapes per vine to achieve a yield from 45 hl/ ha to 55 hl/ha.
Large canopy areas plus leaf removal allow us to produce riper grapes: better sugar content, more phenolics and healthier berries.
We plant grass in the rows to reduce vigour of the vine, erosion and the use of herbicides.
We grow our vineyards respecting the integrated pests ‘management rules, in order to use the minimum of chemicals to protect our vines against pests.
We grow organic viticulture on a 2,5 ha vineyard
