Bruno Clavelier
This estate belonged to Bruno’s Grandfather who sold most of the wine to the négoces, in this case his son, (Bruno’s father) who had his own business in Comblanchien. This was sold in 92 and Bruno was installed at the domaine. For this reason there are no Domaine Clavelier wines prior to 1992.
He grows grass between the rows of vines, for several reasons, one to encourage deeper roots, secondly it encourages the microbiology, thirdly it assists the digestion of earth through to the roots and that is because of microbes on the roots themselves which help break down the bits and pieces for the root system and for the biodiversity of insects.
With grass you get flowers and with flowers you get more insects, so that is good news because it means that if the insects are all killed by insecticide and there are none at all, and then something comes along that’s not very good it tends to take over in a virulent way. By having a diversity of insects, nothing is dominant, so there are no dramatic virulent attacks – you’ll lose something, but not in such a virulent way.
He compares it to having streptococcus in a hospital, which is so perfectly technically clean, that any diseases there, when they do turn up tend to be extremely virulent. He uses pine oil and clay to create an acidic medium to spray on the vines, to protect them from mushrooms, such as oidium. He also does a sort of homeopathic vaccination, which he compares with a man being on a drip in a hospital, which enables him to live forever. Similarly, if you just feed vines and their roots with fertilisers and insecticides, they’ll live forever, but never be very strong.
For the homeopathic vaccination, he creates an infusion of mildew by collecting a few old manky bunches of grapes and then take a selection of that infusion and dilute it down, take a selection of that dilution and dilute it and repeat to end with a very very dilute form of mildew, which can then be sprayed on the vines before the onset of mildew itself and it creates a reaction with the hormones and enzymes in the vines, which come out to counter the mildew before a proper attack of mildew comes and that stops the real attack of mildew having any effect.  Also other trials are underway, but they are a bit secret, so he’s not letting us know about those at the moment. By using less chemicals the vine is stronger - a bit like a person with antibiotics – if you give them all the time, the end of being very weak and their defences very poor and it’s the same with the vine. It’s question of acceptable losses and isolated outbreaks rather than virulent outbreaks and total losses.
Another aspect of his belief is that you have to be very gentle with the grapes and not being aggressive with the handling of them is essential if you don’t want to filter or fine them. So he doesn’t use any pumps – just gravity or pushing the wine with air. 90% of the quality of the wine is achieved in the vines and only 10% being responsible in the cellar and that’s by being very respectful of the wine. Not cooling too much, not doing anything too technological. The more technology you have the further away from the terroir you get. No artificial extraction for this again starts causing problems.
He’s likely to have quite a lot of his vines near what is known as la friche, which is scrubland as this ensures a good insect diversity.