Domaine Julian
Corbières, Ribaute-les-Tavernes, France
 

Domaine Julian has been farmed organically since the late 1970s, when Louis and Chantal Julian took over the estate near Ribaute-les-Tavernes, in the Corbières.
 

They converted the vineyard under Nature et Progrès, started bottling their own wine and opened a small cellar and market stand in Nîmes. In 1987, working with oenologist Jean-François Vrinat, they began vinifying without added sulphites, well ahead of most of the region.
 

Since 2010 their sons Simon and Thibaut have carried the domaine forward, expanding it to 33 hectares, all farmed organically, and restoring the old concrete tanks their parents once used. True to the family's mixed farming roots, they also grow cereals and vegetables, plant hedges and olive trees, and keep poultry and pigs, which graze among the vines and feed the soil in return.
 

The result is a genuinely self-sustaining farm, wine as one part of a much larger, balanced way of working the land.