The location

The Fonfile Estate has a unique geographical site, located between Corbières and Minervois, 25 miles from the Mediterranean Sea. The Fonfile Estate is on the site of an ancient lagoon amidst the hills and mountains of Languedoc, cut off from the sea during the uplift that raised the Pyrenees. The lake was drained under Louis XIV, at the end of the 17th Century, and steadily reclaimed and planted during the French Second Empire.

Philosophy

The Domaine de Fonfile has been in the Gau family for more than 100 years. In the second half of the 19th Century, the Gau family left the Pyrenees for the more hospitable land of Languedoc. Pierre Gau was the first to settle on the land there, and planted the first vines. From 1922 on, Alfred Gau progressively improved the main winery and extended the vineyards. From 1950 on, Jean Gau, further extended the vineyards and diversified production, planting apples. He subsequently gave useful advice to Yves and Jacques Gau, his sons, oenologist and agronomist respectively, who each in his own specialist area, have since helped modernized the Estate’s winegrowing techniques, wine-making and management aiming to produce every year truly authentic wines.

The Estate requires a specific set of winemaking skills where the vineyards are flooded at the end of each winter for several weeks every year, an ancestral technique which allows the vines to be grown on their own rootstock and not attached to American root stock as almost the totality of French vines. As such, the vineyard was uniquely protected from phylloxera in the beginning of the 20th Century. This gives a measure of authenticity to these wonderful wines.