Domaine Olivier

The estate was created in 1959 and has grown to its present seventy-five hectares, a large holding for Saint-Nicolas-de-Bourgueil.

Patrick Olivier ran it from 1983 until 2016, when he handed it to his children. Florian and Marina are in the house today.

In 2006 they obtained Terra Vitis certification, a French sustainable-viticulture label — not the same as organic, and worth not confusing — and have considerably reduced their use of chemical products since.

Their Vieilles Vignes is cabernet franc from vines of about eighty years, aged twelve months in five-hundred-litre barrels.

That figure is not incidental. A small vessel, like the 225-litre Bordeaux barrique, has a great deal of surface relative to the wine it holds: more oxygen enters per litre and it must be topped up more often, which adds still more contact with air. Moving to five hundred litres lowers that ratio, and with it the pace of oxidation and the mark left by the wood.