Melanie Kröber
Melanie arrived in Gaillac from the Jura via Germany, Britain, Australia and America. She is committed to revealing the pure, authentic flavours of rare and native grape varieties.
Melanie Kröber, Melsolo
Melanie’s journey from market researcher to cheesemonger to fine natural winemaker is a like a songline - not always an easy trip, but one that’s given definitive shape to the personality of her wines.
Back home in Germany, she studied economics, film & media and became a market researcher: “Who knows what they want to do at 18?” she says. “At least if you know data analysis, you can get a job anywhere”. She soon left Munich for a job in London, in an office block overlooking the famous Neil’s Yard Dairy cheese shop in Borough Market. For a girl who grew up around a table where food was not the focus, where beer was the staple tipple, where the odd glass of wine always tasted the same, heavy and overly-tannic, and where farming had no place in the conversation, it was a revelation. Melanie spent hours in the cheese shop and that’s where she discovered wine. She spent hours at 40 Maltby Street too, a wine bar located in the warehouse of Gergovie Wines: “There were always wines on tasting there and you could buy them by the glass…lively wines, fabulous wines, wines that I really, really liked - a far cry from the stuff I used to drink with my mates when we went dancing!”
She was fascinated. By yeasts. By fermentation. By farmers who let the land and grapes “speak”. How do they do it? How does milk become an amazing farmhouse cheese? How do grapes become an other-worldly wine? There was no end to her questions and all the books she could possibly read would never give her the full answer. So she quit her well-paid office job and joined Neal’s Yard as a retail assistant. She learned to make cheese in Somerset and ran cheese and wine tastings in the shop. She went grape-picking in Australia twice and then she went to Vermont in the USA to work at La Garagista, a farm and winery dedicated to expressing the inherent nature of their grapes. She would have stayed there forever if she’d been able to prolong her visa, but it wasn’t to be - the rare and forgotten grapes of Gaillac would be her destiny.
Melanie was pruning in the Jura when a friend tipped her off about Gaillac. One visit and she was won over - by the lay of the land, the villages with their food markets, the local grapes varieties and all the organic wine producers. The first winemaker she met was Patrice Lescarret at Causse Marines, a forerunner and figurehead of the natural wine movement in the region. Little did she know that five years later, she would call a piece of his land her home. The second was Marine Leys at La Vigneureuse: “Welcome to Gaillac” she said. Her warmth was not shared by everyone. Melanie’s first two years in the Tarn were tough: “ It’s not easy for anyone to start a new life in rural France and ten times harder if you’re a woman, alone, with a project to become a winemaker and limited proficiency in the language.” Melanie was not always taken seriously. She was misjudged and misunderstood, but she persevered. She worked at diverse estates, in the vineyard and in the winery, and managed to rent a few neglected hectares and some garage space to produce her first vintages under the “Melsolo” label. Those wines were her saving grace. They gave her strength and motivation, especially as they were so well-received by her extended wine community.
Today, Melanie is in her element, working 3 hectares of vines leased from Patrice Lescarret at Causse Marines in one of the lushest corners of Gaillac. In June 2023, she released her fourth vintage (2022): four wines from four different plots: Burlesque, Shades, Blüte and Breathe – because that’s what she can finally do here. She works with native varieties: Mauzac, Loin de L’Oeil and Braucol, as well as Jurançon Noir, Semillon and Petit Manseng. She mows the grass, tills the soils, prunes, dynamises and sprays. She cares for these vines in the same way as Virginie Maignien (now at La Spanda) and Patrice did before her, and she has her own ideas too: '"To keep these soils alive, to keep this vineyard strong, I want to let the grasses grow between all the rows, not just every other one. The old school says that alternate cover-cropping allows oxygen to flow between the vines. It may have worked until now. But for how much longer? It’s simply not sustainable. You should never have bare soils. That’s the first rule of regenerative agriculture.”
Melanie is feeling bolder and brighter than ever before, and its perceptible in her wines. Light macerations are her trademark, on white grapes and red grapes too, an approach that turns typical Gaillacois winemaking processes on their head. Her red wine is light and fruity, a wine you could drink all day. Her white wines are fresh and vibrant with discreet tannins that reveal unexpected proportions like a Christo-wrap in nature. The wines of Melsolo reveal a hidden side of nature and a hidden side of a wilful woman with chiselled taste who is devoted to preserving pure and authentic flavours.
At a Glance
Hectares
3
Terroir
Thin clay-limestone on the Cordes Plateau
Grape Varieties
Mauzac, Loin de L’Oeil, Semillon, Petit Manseng, Braucol, Jurançon Noir
