La Ferme du Vert Lou Xidat

About La Ferme du Vert Lou Xidat

La Ferme du Vert Lou Xidat might be the weirdest damn bottle you can buy from us. Made of Duras, a red grape known for making high alcohol sappy wines. Yet here, the winemaker ages the wine sous voile, or under the development of flor (yeast). The result is an oxidative red, at times funky, salty, nutty, and so beguiling.

About Jérôme Galaup

The descendant from a long line of winemakers, Jérôme Galaup breathed new life into his family exploits at “La Ferme du Vert” in 2017 after gaining experience working alongside the Plageoles family, just 5 kilometers away. Armed with the green thumb of generations of local farmers and the thoughtful knowledge of the local viticultural landscape and local varieties, Jérôme is making wines of extremely high quality and character that he manages to fuse into each cuvée across a wide range of styles. The wines stay rustic; almost like the setting, but it’s the style of “rustic” with intention, one where everything has a place.

Jérôme is surely a rising star in the neighborhood if not a local star already. Much attention is paid to the vines, a careful analysis each day through the eyes of someone who has grown up between those same rows; he feels the change in the temperature, sees micro changes in the vines, and knows when his cows are vines aren’t “jiving” its a grower’s sixth sense that goes beyond scientific understanding and links more to an intuition that can’t be trained. Jérôme has an incredibly good sense of his land; not only does he oversee his 9 hectares of vines but a small herd of cattle and 10 additional hectares or so of mixed cereals, the whole lot surrounded by dense forest. He practices vilification and farming without manipulation. The wines are at times frank, fresh and savory; ultimately we find the expression of each local variety but they resemble nothing else.

There is a deep connection with the earth and with the land, the wines become the place and the place is evident in each wine, the vats of cereal left to dry, the coniferous smell of the forest, sun-ripened fruit, and the ever-fleeting smell of animals that are well loved. Wines of the Southwest are often misconstrued to be dense and lack precision aromatically, but it isn’t the case. Red varieties like Braucol and Duras can be vinified to thick, high-alcohol wines rather than displaying balance and a character of ripe almost dried fruit & herbs. Whites can sometimes have that character, with Mauzac and Muscadelle being too textured or too subtle.