It won’t come as a surprise, but running a small natural wine producer is economically tough, especially when you are a new winery producing something unconventional.
When we bought Shuette from the previous owner and winemaker, he told us to be prepared to lose the equivalent of 100% of an annual harvest every five years. The hope is that it does not happen all at once, but frost, hail, torrential rain, mildew, pests, and issues during spontaneous fermentation can wipe out a crop in a single day.
For many people like us, buying a vineyard means risking your life savings on a project you feel deeply passionate about. Shuette is a small 12-hectare vineyard and farm, with 5.5 hectares under vine. In a good year, we could produce around 16,000 bottles of wine. However, that has not happened yet.
We make natural wine with zero additives and farm our land organically, focusing on regenerative ecosystem building alongside biodynamic practices.
In Shuette’s first year, there was enormous mildew pressure across Bordeaux. As the pressure mounted, we were advised that the only way to protect the harvest was to massively increase crop spraying, far beyond the limits set for certified organic farming. My wife and I had promised ourselves that if this happened, we would resist that advice, stick to our principles, and work the land as best as possible within organic limitations. We believe that losing one year's crop is better than permanently damaging the soil through chemical mismanagement. Despite our best efforts, mildew wiped out 100% of our Merlot (45% of our total vines) two weeks later, which completely broke our hearts.
Shortly after this devastating blow, we noticed signs of a vine disease called Flavescence Dorée, spread by leafhoppers that lay their eggs on the vines. When they hatch, they transmit a bacterial disease within the plant, suppressing fruit production and eventually killing the vine. Because physical symptoms only become visible 3 to 4 years after initial infection, this underlying issue was completely hidden when we purchased the estate.
Our worst fears were confirmed a couple of months later when official tests revealed that 20% of two separate plots were infected. We were legally ordered to pull up all the vines in those areas, which equates to an annual loss of approximately 3,000 bottles for the next 4 to 5 years while we rehabilitate the soil and establish new vines.
By the end of 2023, we were exhausted and our nerves were frayed. I remember standing in the vineyard feeling utterly drained and powerless. We knew the 2023 season would not break even, and almost all of our financial margin for the next 4 to 5 years was effectively wiped out by those unproductive Flavescence plots.
The 2024 season started bitterly cold, with almost no pollinators active for the fruit trees. When the cold snap finally relented, it brought 30% more rainfall than usual for months on end, flooding Shuette three times, with standing water reaching over 30 cm deep in places.
By mid-summer, conditions improved. A few dry, sunny weeks allowed the fruit to set and begin maturing. But we were not out of the woods yet. August was much cooler than usual, and September brought more rain, raising fears of Botrytis, a mould that attacks fragile grapes from deep within the cluster. We decided to hold our nerve through three agonising weeks to achieve proper aromatic and pH maturity. We were rewarded with fantastic grapes, with only minor damage that our harvest team could sort out by hand. As temperatures dropped further, spontaneous fermentations ran uncharacteristically slowly.
In 2024, we committed fully to zero-zero winemaking, using zero additives and zero filtration, relying entirely on natural processes. In previous years, we might have gently warmed the tanks using hot water jackets, but we stuck to our pledge and let fermentation run its natural course. This required leaving the fermentation tanks open for an extended period to allow naturally produced CO2 to off-gas. It is hard to pinpoint the exact cause, but that decision likely cost us another 4,500 bottles of wine: after months of maturation, two tanks developed off-aromas that fell short of our quality standards. With that loss, the 2024 season will also fail to break even.
Despite all of this, our resolve to produce organic, natural, zero-zero wine has never been stronger. In fact, we are pushing ourselves to take more risks, exploring new styles and more sustainable farming practices every single day.
When times get tough, I often return to this excerpt from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses:
"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."