La Tracole
La Tracole is an independent micro winery crafting small-batch wines from carefully selected grapes grown by passionate growers.
Wine begins in the vineyard. Before fermentation, ageing or any winemaking decision, there is the patient work of those who tend the vines throughout the year. We work with growers whose commitment and attention to detail produce healthy, balanced and expressive fruit.
Everyone has their craft: they grow the grapes, we try to do them justice.
From there, we take care of everything that follows: winemaking, ageing, blending, bottling and bringing the wines to market. This freedom allows us to approach each lot individually and adapt our choices to each vintage rather than following a predetermined recipe.
We produce only micro-cuvées, usually limited to just a few hundred bottles. Not to create artificial scarcity, but because working at this scale allows us to stay closely connected to every stage of the wine's evolution.
Each cuvée is the result of an encounter between grapes, a vintage and an idea.
Discover the winesOur philosophy
Wine is a subtle balance of many factors: terroir, grape variety, viticultural practices, winemaking and ageing, to name just a few.
Understanding the role each of these elements plays is a question that has fascinated me for years, and one for which I still don't claim to have a definitive answer.
In many ways, La Tracole is my way of exploring that question.
Each cuvée is a real-world experiment. An opportunity to observe, test, compare and learn. Not as a technical exercise, but in the pursuit of wines that feel balanced, honest and enjoyable to drink.
The approach in the cellar is deliberately low-intervention. My goal is to guide the wine rather than control it, limiting additions to what is strictly necessary and allowing fermentations to follow their natural course.
No sulphur is added during fermentation. Why? Simply because, through experience, I generally find wines made this way to be more complex, more open and more expressive.
Afterwards, each cuvée is assessed individually to determine its actual needs. When additions become necessary, particularly before bottling, they are made with restraint and without dogma.
I value pragmatism over rigid principles and the quality of the wine over marketing claims.
Working on a small scale also offers something precious: the freedom to experiment, to take risks and occasionally venture off the beaten path. Some wines may be surprising, others more classic, but all are made with the same objective: creating wines that I enjoy making and am proud to share.
The journey
I did not grow up in a winemaking family, and nothing particularly destined me for a life in wine. Nothing, except a passion for wine and a desire to understand it. Today, I still work as a software engineer. It is a profession I genuinely enjoy, and one that gives me a valuable kind of freedom: the ability to build La Tracole without financial pressure, guided by curiosity rather than necessity.
For years, wine has been an endless source of questions:
- How much influence does terroir really have? What belongs to the grape variety? How much of the final result is shaped by the choices made in the cellar?
- When great winemakers say that everything begins in the vineyard, is it an act of humility, or simply a way of highlighting the value of exceptional land?
- Would a bottle of Romanée Conti still be extraordinary if it were made by a beginner? Could Henri Jayer have crafted a great wine from merely average grapes?
The more I learned, the more questions emerged.
That curiosity eventually led me to study viticulture and oenology, looking to confront theory with reality. Through classes, tastings, harvests, conversations with growers and hands-on cellar work, I did not find all the answers, but I profoundly changed the way I think about wine.
La Tracole grew out of that journey. Not from a desire to build a wine brand, but from a desire to keep learning through practice, to continue experimenting, and to share wines that I enjoy both making and drinking. Today, every cuvée is both an achievement and a new question. And that is probably what makes the adventure so enjoying.
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