introduction
The project L'Entremetteuse was created by Laurence Réal, and aims at bringing people together around wine and sharing. L’Entremetteuse produces wines in Chile, in the Colchagua Valley and sells them in France, thanks to the help of her French partners. It’s a project of micro winemakers who make their wine as artisanally as possible, but who do not own vines. Everything is handmade, the grapes are destemmed by hand, and fermentations are done in small containers. Thus, the wines are produced as naturally as possible, and the sulphite content is reduced to a minimum, and for some wines is inexistent. In addition, everything is done by gravity without pumping, which ensures that the grapes are not damaged.
work time
We spent 4 days working for l’Entremetteuse. We met Laurence and her husband, Pablo, who work together. L'Entremetteuse not only produces white and red wines but also natural sparkling wines (“Pétillant Natural”), which are in fact wines that finish their fermentation in the bottle, thus making them sparkling. L’Entremetteuse chooses the fruits that will co-ferment together in her original “Pétillant Naturel”. During the 4 days, we helped starting the process of this natural sparkling wine, a mixture of Pais grapes, apples, quinces and pear.
First, we helped to sort the Pais grapes which had just been harvested and that came from ancient 135+ year old vines. Then the grinding began with apples and quinces going into the mix. Then we participated in the treading of the grapes, a method used to split the grape berries to extract the must without crushing the pips. We treaded the grapes with our feet, a traditional and original method!
We then mixed the grape must, the apples and the quinces that had been squeezed and we transferred them to a bucket so that they could ferment together. It was then necessary to do the pigeage of the grapes many times a day, so that the marc cap (made up of the skins and pips of the fruits) containing many aromas and tannins can be mixed with the pressed juice.
On the last day, we participated in the bottling of some 1000 bottles of the "pet nat rosé" from last year. Once again, it was a very manual process with someone at every stage of the process: one would prepare the empty bottles on a table, another would fill the bottle with the juice, another would put the cap on it, then one would sort the bottle in a box and count them. It took us around 2 hours and half to fill up these bottles!
