Domaine de Mouscaillo

Domaine de Mouscaillo is a family estate on the Roquetaillade terroir, in the Limoux appellation, founded in 2004 by Marie-Claire and Pierre Fort. Camille, Thomas and Frédéric now run its 7 hectares of vineyards, perched in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The estate is farmed on the principles of agroecology, on a high-altitude terroir, to make wines that are uncommon for the Languedoc, with a long ageing potential.

Pierre and Marie-Claire grew up in Roquetaillade and worked in the vineyards of Pierre's family in their youth. They left in the 1980s and worked at other estates, many years of them in the Loire Valley. There they met Didier Dagueneau, who encouraged them to go back home and take over the family vineyards. That was in 2004, and at the time they got back only 4 hectares of Chardonnay.

In 2017, Camille and Thomas, Pierre and Marie-Claire's daughter-in-law and son, who worked in ecology at a French research lab, decided to quit their jobs and come back to the estate. They now run it, while their parents have "retired": they bought a tiny vineyard in Banyuls, where they make white and red Collioure.

They farm four hectares of Chardonnay and one hectare of Pinot Noir, among them a 40-year-old vineyard handed down from Pierre's family, which he planted himself as a teenager. At 480 metres, the cool air tempers the warm Languedoc sun. The limestone and clay bedrock of the vineyards is particularly interesting: it is full of 50-million-year-old fossils, much like that of Chablis.

They follow no particular dogma in the vineyard, but they choose organic methods, as they believe nature has the solution to all of its problems. They harvest by hand and sort the grapes as they pick. Fermenting and ageing are done in large puncheons, oak barrels of 450 to 600 litres, the magic size for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grown outside the Côte d'Or. The whites are stirred on their lees now and then. That is as complex as it gets, since the Forts make their wines in the vineyard rather than in the cellar, and each vintage brings its own conditions.

Since Limoux is best known abroad for its sparkling wine, not much of its still wine actually leaves the region.