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Domaine des POTHIERS - Romain Paire - Côte Roannaise

For more than a century, the Pothier family has been at the head of this 92-hectare mixed farming and livestock property, whose reputation is today due to the vine. The name "Pothier" became "Paire" when the ancestor Blaise Pothier died during the First World War and his sister took over with her husband Claude Paire, the great-grandfather of the current winemaker, Romain Paire.

Since his arrival in 2005, the latter has not been idle: extension of the vineyard from 5 to 22 hectares, modernisation of the installations, switch to organic farming and then obtaining biodynamic certification.

The Domaine des Pothiers is today, with the Domaine Sérol, above the rest, and the two friends Stéphane Sérol and Romain Paire are today the best ambassadors of their AOP Côte Roannaise (the most southern of the AOPs of the Loire Valley!). The latter has the wind in its sails, thanks to its high granitic slopes: it can perfectly meet the growing demand for great wines that remain accessible and fresh, elegant and without too much alcohol or the need to age for 20 years before tasting. Long live the Gamay Saint-Romain grape variety!

The desire for quality is omnipresent at the Domaine des Pothiers: manual harvesting, sorting of the berries on arrival, destemming or not depending on the cuvée, transfer of the harvest by gravity only, exclusive use of indigenous yeasts for fermentation, gentle extraction (light pumping over). Depending on the cuvée, the wine is matured in concrete or truncated concrete vats, demi-muids, oak barrels, tuns or amphoras. Of course, the wine is bottled on the estate.

All these precautions are taken with the sole aim of offering high quality wines with a gourmet profile, which are the perfect expression of the freshness of the altitude, the minerality of the soil and of course the legendary fruit of the Gamay Saint-Romain.

To go into more detail, it is important to know that nothing is left to chance in this mixed farming and cattle breeding operation (the Bazadais and Limousin cows which provide the compost for natural fertilisation)! Alternatively, soil work (ploughing to force the roots to draw their mineral salts from deep within the soil) and the cultivation of green manure one row in two. Short pruning (Cordon de Royat) and green work (disbudding, leaf removal, trellising...) allow us to limit the yields for a better concentration of juice in the rarer bunches, which are thus perfectly aerated and ripe.

Apart from Gamay Saint-Romain, the grape variety ideally suited to the decomposed granite soil (sandy and ideally draining) of the foothills of the Massif Central, a few other grape varieties are better suited to this more clayey plot (Chardonnay for example, but also Pinot Gris, Riesling and Negrette).