A century of history.
At the beginning, in 1912, there is Bernard’s great-grandfather, my husband. He owned a business of “tartres et lies”, he bought the estate for his daughter who then married Fernand Vaquer (whom I call Fernand I since he gave his first name to his son).
Fernand 1er was a famous rugby player.
French champion with the USAP, the Perpignan club, in 1921 as a player and then four more times between 1925 and 1955 as a manager. He was nicknamed “the marshal”.
From 1947, he replanted the vineyard with his son. At present, the Carignan of the “Exception” and “Expression” cuvées is still made from it .
From 1947, he replanted the vineyard with his son. At present, the Carignan of the “Exception” and “Expression” vintages is still produced from this vineyard…
Born in 1929, “Fernand II” started working on the estate at the age of 17 and he hasn’t forgotten his grandfather’s first lesson: “The cellar must be as clean as the kitchen!”.
In 1968, he was among the very first winegrowers in Roussillon to bottle his red wine.
“We picked the grapes at between 12 and 13°,” Fernand says. I put the Carignan and Grenache grapes together in the vat and we pressed them a month later. The wine stayed in the vat for two years, never saw the wood. I made the wine at my own discretion”.
Concerned about the long ageing of his wines, he had the idea of storing the bottles in his wife’s family farm in the mountains, in Cerdagne. Today, we still have a few “collection” bottles of these old wines and they taste very surprisingly.
At the time, the label was labelled VDQS “Roussillon dels Aspres”, the AOC Côtes-du-Roussillon didn’t yet exist?
But when the Côtes-du-Roussillon Les Aspres appellation appeared in 2003, I took it as a nice wink: the “Exception” cuvée now has this appellation.
Before succeeding his father, Bernard, my husband, came to Dijon to study oenology. That’s where we met in 1985.
