Francois Villard 79 Items

A cook by training, François Villard developed a passion for wine at the age of 20. Not knowing how to integrate the world of wine, he completed a year of Professional Brevet in sommellerie at Tain l'Hermitage. The meetings were decisive and gave him the desire to become a winegrower. Subsequently, he enrolled in Davayé, with a view to obtaining the Professional Agricultural Certificate, option in viticulture and oenology.

At the same time, he began to acquire his first wasteland in the town of St Michel in the Condrieu appellation. The first vine was planted in the spring of 1989, as soon as it obtained its patent. The first Condrieu was produced in 1991 and the first 400 bottles were released in the fall of 1992.

While his first vinifications took place in Verlieu, in a cellar behind Yves Cuilleron's, he decided to build his own building in 1996 in St Michel Sur Rhône. It was also on this date that he embarked on the adventure of reviving the Seyssuel vineyard with his colleagues Yves Cuilleron and Pierre Gaillard.

The estate now has more than 40 hectares of vines, supplemented with a few purchases of grapes and produces around 400,000 bottles a year. All the work in the vineyard is done entirely manually and the estate has been in organic conversation on the Ecocert label since August 2019.

The attention paid to the vines and the care taken to preserve these specific terroirs are constant and accompany the cultivation throughout the year. The harvest is decided plot by plot so that each bunch is harvested with perfect maturity.