2025 was a good vintage, with a total of 940 mm of rainfall between January 2025 and October 2025. The winter was cold but unfortunately snowless, and bud break began in late March among the lower vineyards and in mid-April among the higher vineyards. Abundant rainfall in winter and spring helped us to face this beautiful vintage.

In late spring and summer the weather helped us, with some rain and moderate temperatures in June and July, allowing the grapes to fully mature in early September. By September, on northern Etna, we had average temperatures of 10 degrees Celsius at night and 20-25 degrees Celsius during the day, which allowed for slow and balanced ripening.

The harvest began on September 16th with the picking of the white grapes from the lower vineyards for our Versante Nord Bianco. The harvest concluded on October 20th in our highest vineyard, Quota N. We can be satisfied with this year's production. We will have lighter, lower-alcohol reds thanks this year, while for the Versante Nord Bianco, we will have a higher percentage of Carricante,around 80%. We believe this will contribute more acidic structure to the wine, providing a clearer representation of the Carricante from the northern part of Etna compared to the eastern side.

Here are some pictures of the 2025 harvest!

2025: heatwaves and hail.

2025 started well enough, with a spring that balanced rain and sun, leading the vines to a healthy, slightly advanced cycle with flowering in early June, leading us to believe we’d harvest somewhere around mid-September. Around June 15th, temperatures starting steadily rising to over 85 degrees. At this point, the vines soaked up the sun to develop its vegetal cycle. After a severe hail storm in July that damaged two of our hectares, another heatwave scorched the vines for the last two weeks of August.

The grapes began to suffer, as the vines began absorbing their juices to resist and therefore lowering what we’d initially planned to harvest. In Sancerre, the first team of pickers arrived in late August to make sure that alcoholic potentials wouldn’t sky-rocket. We began on September 2nd: we are far from the yields we would hope for, there was hardly any juice in the grapes so this is yet another vintage with really low yields. The one positive is the balance of the juices, with potentials ranging between 13 and 14% and good acidities.

While this has always been the case, we are now dependent on climactical conditions that continue to become even more extreme. 2025 was the most precocious vintage since 1976, narrowly beating out 2003 and 2009 by a couple of days.

The 2025 vintage was characterized by abundant rainfall during late spring and a predominance of the Mistral, a cool, dry wind blowing from the northwest.
This allowed the vines to achieve good yields and delay the ripening of the grapes.

Zibibbo, a grape known for its thick skin, produced very large bunches this year with large berries, shifting the skin/pulp balance in favor of the pulp. Macerations were therefore shorter and the musts, lower in sugar than usual, were characterized by excellent acidity and freshness.

The wines have a low alcohol content, resulting in immediate and exceptionally drinkable wines from the start. Thanks to their volcanic flavor, the persistence on the palate never wanes. It is a rare vintage, and one that leaves us pleasantly surprised, especially since, in recent harvests, we have been accustomed to warm Sirocco winds and extreme temperatures.

In the plots where ripening occurs early, namely those near the sea, we harvested almost late, picking healthy, very ripe grapes that we dried to produce Passulata. This wine hadn't been made since 2021 because the grapes were never up to par.
It's been 10 years since we started, a very short time for someone in this profession. We still have a lot to learn, yet today I feel I know every plant on our 3 hectares better, I can sense how the wine from each plot will evolve, whether it will tend to reduce or oxidize, whether it should be separated from its lees sooner or later, and I'm more aware of the potential of our wines despite the variability
of the vintage.

I think that, just as pruning a vine requires metaphorically entering the plant itself, understanding the terroir and interpreting it requires living it every day, even though this requires enormous sacrifices because I live on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, far from the rest of the world.

Our 2025 harvest lasted from September 1st to September 12th with a few days of break in the middle The grapes were healthy with moderate-to-low yields but ultimately better than our tiny 2024 harvest.

The first wines seem tannic and well structured. I believe it will be quality vintage.

Sylvie,

Winter 2024 was not a very cold one and unfortunately without snow. This lead to the budding of the vines started earlier than in previous years. Some rain in Spring helped face the early summer months.

We were very careful during the flowering in June, remembering how devastating it was in 2023 and fearing to find any spore of mildew. But the weather helped us in this sense, with a dry June and July followed by rains in August that led our plants to reach a good ripening.
 
The harvest started on September 14th with the red grapes: a week earlier than in previous years. We started from the lowest vines, continuing in elevation. It was the hottest harvest we've ever had, reaching up to 30 Celsius and leading to the driest harvest we have seen in all my years on Etna. The ripening was very similar between one vineyard to another: we harvested the grapes in Nave, our highest vineyard on October 4th, 15 days earlier than usual, finishing the harvest in just 20 days.
 
We can be satisfied with the production this year, with intense, deep reds. By incorporating a new vineyard planted in 2021, the Versante Nord Bianco will have a lower percentage of Minnella and more Carricante. We think that this will help bring more acidity to the wine. 
 
In 2024, we were able to produce the totality of our cuvées, unlike in 2023 where we only produced Versante Nord Rosso and the two whites .

Here is what we can say about the 2024 vintage:

It was a bit of a complicated year...

Frost was extremely localized but it still did its damage on a part of the Pain Perdu parcels, impacting our yields by about 20%.

It was a very cool summer, meaning we didn't have much respite from constant mildew pressure. 

Our September -the critical month before harvest- was also quite rainy, forcing us to manually strip off leaves from both sides on the vines to help accelerate the grapes' extremely slow maturation. 

Harvest itself was quite nice, it was the inauguration of our "new" very old vertical press for the whites and, for the first time, the reds as well. 

Yields are lower than 2023 but the juices are fresh with lower alcohol than recent vintages. 

Here are some photos: 

“2022 leaves us with the impression that we've seen what the future holds in terms of climate change: spring frost, lack of rain, summer heat.”

I wrote this for the 2022 harvest report. I was so wrong. So either I’m a total fool or the climate is changing and unpredictable. Most likely both.

2024 was super rainy and it still is as I’m writing this on December 11th. It’s been raining for pretty much a year here. So we had to adapt our work in the vineyard, no plowing, just cutting the grass, a lot of spraying against mildew. But at the end we had a reasonably good harvest. And we realize how lucky we were this year compared to a lot of other regions of France.

We hired a large team of young and motivated Europeans so the harvest was fast, finished in 3 weeks which is very comfortable compared to some vintages where it seems to last forever.

Yields and maturity were almost normal. The juices are fermenting very slowly in our brand new cellar but we stay patient. You can expect bright acidity and the whole range to be produced this vintage.

2024 was marked by a record amount of rainfall in France and Chinon was not spared. After avoiding any issues with frost, we were under intense mildew pressure from early May through mid-August. We spent all Spring and Summer fighting against this illness, which gnawed at the leaves and many grapes in certain parcels. 

We were hoping for an Indian summer that never came: September was just as rainy and forced us to push back our harvest start date to October. We then hoped that this extra time would give the grapes more time to concentrate in sugars but this remained fairly limited. 

Despite the weather conditions, the Cabernet Franc resisted fairly well but mildew still severely reduced our crop to about 30hl/h. With the Chenin, itself a thin-skinned variety, we had to find very short windows to pick so that the grapes not be diluted from water. 

The 2024 reds have nice color and structure, clocking in between 11.5 and 12.5 and without any agressive green notes. It's a little early to tell, but 2024 seems very promising and already superior to 2023, another vintage marked by heavy rain.  

After a dramatic 2023,  we were very worried about the seasonal trends we started seeing in 2024. The winter was hot and dry and caused early budding and flowering. Spring was normal with the right amount of rain. The vines were beautiful and full of grapes. This is perhaps due to the fact that last year the plants had practically no production in 2023 and had accumulated reserves for the following year.

Throughout the spring we let cover crops grow vigorously: broad beans, mustard, barley and vetch accompanied the vegetative push of the vines. July and August were extremely hot and above all completely without rain. Some areas of the vineyards suffered and there we had to harvest very early because the grapes were burning. But more generally, the stress blocked the ripening of the grapes: a year that seemed very precocious in the end was one of the slowest in recent years. With the beginning of September very nice rains arrived that helped plump up the grapes.

It was a joyful harvest. We harvested a lot of grapes, very healthy and with excellent acidity. Alcohol this year was lower than usual. We will have light and fresh wines, very easy to drink but the Crus will be also complex wines thanks to the beautiful acidity that will guarantee excellent evolution over time. Now we are waiting for the oxidation-reduction processes related to the fine lees to enrich the wines during the winter.

Here is a quick recap of this "exceptional" vintage.

-A lot of cumulative rainfall in the 2023/2024 winter that was so intense it did not permit us to finish planting our cover crops. The ones we did plant had to get ripped out as they had rotted in the soil. 

- We had a spring frost in mid-April that destroyed between 1/4 to 1/3rd of the buds depending on the parcels.

-Over 300mm of rain in May and June which led to a simultaneous coulure and agressive attack of mildew on the buds. Even though coulure seemed to be responsible for the worst of the damage, mildew continued destroying buds all the way to veraison in mid-August. In total we did 14 treatments, four of which were on foot because the tractors couldn't get into the vines. 

-We had a two week break with no rain in the summer but it started up again in late August and continued through September. This led to grey rot during harvest, forcing us to leave many bunches on the floor during harvest. It also forced us to finish our harvest as quickly as possible in order to lose the minimum amount of grapes, which were already on the verge of dilution. It is the first time in our history that we did a double pass selection of the grapes, first in the vines and again in the cellar. 

In the end we brought in about 1/4 of a crop partially compensated by purchased fruit since our cellar was less than half full. The wines are extremely light (from 10 to 12.5%) but still precise and free of flaws. The only satisfaction of this vintage was the vinifications, which went very smoothly thanks to very high acidities and low alcoholic potential. It was also a first for us: the lowest levels of volatile acidity in the history of the estate!