The Laurent family have been making wines without artifice for over 40 years. After working around the world, Pierre-Oliver and Pauline Laurent are raising their own family at Domaine Cantalauze, and crafting pure natural wines.

In Occitan, Cantalauze means song of the skylark, a rare bird that flies higher than most and makes its nest on the ground. Pauline and Pierre-Olivier met at university where they studied agricultural engineering. They both went on to build successful careers before meeting up again and making their nest at Cantalauze. Pauline worked in exports in Paris. Pierre-Olivier studied viticulture & oenology in Montpellier and went on to make wine in Australia, Chile, Uruguay and California.

He would work abroad for 6-months of the year and spend the other half here in South West France: “Most winemakers make about 40 vintages in their lifetime, but I’ve doubled my experience by working in the Southern and Northern hemispheres.” He worked on small, biodynamic farms and much larger estates. He saw what to do and what not to do: “I learned a lot, fast, and by the time I was 30, I was ready to come home.”

Home is Cantaulauze, one of the most beautiful estates in Gaillac, with 4 hectares of vines in front of the house and 3 a bit higher surrounded by woodland. “Biodiversity is the winemaker's principal ally” says Pierre-Olivier. “Look down and you see grass and insects. Look up and you see hedges, groves and moorland and beyond that, the huge forest of the Grésigne. The vines fit into this landscape and build it at the same time.” It’s an eco-system”, says Pauline. “We have oaks and lilacs, acacias and fruit trees. We grow figs and prunes, sunflowers and cereal crops and we have chicory, dandelion, mint, violets, lettuce and nasturtiums that grow by themselves. The trees create a balance and a microclimate. The birds feed on the fruit and insects, so the vines are exposed to fewer predators. We’re planting more because vines can live for 80 - 100 years in the right conditions. Trees open the doors to time.”

They tend to the earth with the lightest touch, de-compacting it with a crawler every now and again: “we just work on the surface to keep it loose and healthy. There are layers of life in the soil and we don’t want to shake it up. The soil is aired and enriched with green fertilisers: “We let the grass and flowers grow between the rows and at the end of Spring, they gives us our compost. We want living soils that feed the vines, so we feed them with the local flora and the branches that we prune. We crush it all up and give it back to the vines.” says Pauline.

The vines are 2 metres high and magnificent: the result of an ingenious pruning system invented by Pierre-Olivier’s father Guy Laurent in 1991, the “Taille Cantalauze.” It’s based on an alternated double cordon system: one cordon produces the grapes and the other produces leaves, and then the system is inverted the following year: “The sap is distributed between the harvest and the reserve, the present and the future. It helps fight humidity and prevent disease. The roots extract water from the deepest point in the ground and the leaves capture the sun’s energy at the highest level. We drive the vines high off the ground so that a green carpet can flourish beneath and the leaves have the largest surface possible exposed to the sun. We cut them back a little so that they grow towards the light, without pointlessly thickening their leaves. The leaves and grape bunches don’t pile up at the base, the wind and sun can circulate freely which limits parasites, and it makes harvesting much easier because everything’s at human height!” The vines are planted North to South to capture the maximum amount of sunlight: “it’s a sugar factory, a polyphenol factory, an aroma factory” says Pierre-Olivier.

The bedrock lies just 3 feet under these lacustrine clay soils. At the far end of the estate, there’s a magical spot where you can see it: a woodland grove with an old well covered in moss and a little stream. It’s 32°C on the plain, but cool and shady down here…an ideal terroir for the local grape varieties: Braucol which gives notes of blackcurrants and red fruit. Prunelard, the father of Malbec, which gives deep, dark wines with aromas of fresh plums, ripe fruit and pepper. It’s the father of Malbec and before phylloxera, it was the base of all the red wines in Gaillac: “ We keep it for our sparkling rosé Astrolabe and our still rosé Evanescence . It’s very aromatic with light tannins,” says Pierre-Olivier. Their Syrah grapes are carbo-macerated to create a quaffable red called Cantalauze. They blend their Duras and Braucol to make fruity Libre Expression or age them for a year in old oak barrels to give full-bodied Insolence. They have several varieties of Mauzac too, which are pressed and blended to craft dry white Dissidence or aged in old oak barrels to give Terre Lune. And then, there’s Astragale matured in egg-shaped amphoras : terracotta for the red (Braucol) and sandstone for the white (Mauzac, Ondenc & Loin de L’oeil. Two pure character wines named after a novel by Albertine Sarrazin published in 1965 and a favourite of Pierre-Oliver’s mother who brought the spirit of free expression to Cantalauze.