Hervé Villemade has been working his family’s vines in Cellettes since taking over from his father in 1995. Today, the estate represents about 22 hectares of organically farmed fruit, all within the Cheverny and Cour-Cheverny AOCs. When Hervé first took over the estate, everything was farmed chemically and vinified conventionally. Unaware of an alternative, he followed in his parents’ footsteps but quickly found his work “uninspired and bland.” Around 1997, Hervé was introduced to the wines of Marcel Lapierre and Clos du Tué-Boeuf, which immediately struck a chord with him. Coincidentally, at the exact same time that he was discovering these wines, Hervé started developing a very serious allergy to sulfur. The sulfur had to go, and first attempts at sulfur-free vinifications quickly led to the conclusion that to make wine this way, you needed high quality grapes. So in 2000, Hervé decided to convert the estate to organic viticulture.
