Domaine de la Pépière: The Domaine Grows
When Marc Ollivier started out he had just 7 hectares of vines, located within a single block, and he made a single cuvée. He began in a simple fashion, working conventionally in the vines, ensuring the fermentations were completed by adding a cultured yeast, a far cry from the less interventional, organic and increasingly biodynamic domaine he runs today. His first commercial vintage was 1985. As the years passed Marc gained experience and confidence, and the way he ran the domaine soon began to change.
The first outward sign of change began in the late 1980s. Marc was vinifying the wines on a plot-by-plot basis, and it was now that he began to carry that approach through to the finished wines. He began bottling the Briords cuvée, initially named Clos des Briords, taking the name from the cadastral maps of the region (I will provide more detail on this when I examine the various cuvées in more detail on page four of this profile), releasing the first vintage in 1988. This was followed closely by Clos Cormerais in 1992. It was around this time that Marc’s use of cultured yeast fell by the wayside; he switched to allowing some vats to ferment naturally, while continuing to add yeast to others, and convinced by the quality of the naturally fermented lots he soon stopped using cultured yeast altogether.
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