La Grande Rando 2021

Angela Weidner and Maxime Aerts are artisan natural winemakers who split their time between the sun-drenched terraced hills of the Southern Rhône and the extreme, high-altitude slopes of the Hautes-Alpes. After leaving careers in IT and events management to study agroecology and viticulture, they founded Les Terres du Gaugalin in 2018 in the Gard department, tending three hectares of old clay-limestone vines named after the Provençal word for wild poppy. Driven by a desire for cooler mountain terroirs, they expanded in 2020 with Les Raisins Suspendus in the Crévoux Valley, working at dizzying altitudes of 800 to 1,000 metres to revive rare, native alpine grape varieties like Mollard and Persan. Across both sites, their philosophy is entirely low-intervention and ecological; they cultivate their vineyards by hand using herbal teas and plant manures, reject synthetic chemicals and heavy machinery, and vinify their hand-picked fruit with indigenous yeasts, no temperature manipulation, and absolutely zero added sulfites, fining, or filtration.