We are Mike and Sue Spring, owners of Domaine du Garinet, a small wine property near the village of Le Boulvé, within the Cahors wine area.

Our main activity is wine, but we also have a walnut orchard, and we produce a small quantity of prunes (pruneaux d’Agen).  Each year, we make around 17,000 bottles of wine and between one and two tonnes of walnuts.   Our range of wines includes red, dry white and rosé.

Our objective is to make the very highest quality products that we can.  Because we are a small property, we can give attention to detail and be fastidious to a degree which is difficult with larger quantities.

Visiting us

We welcome customers coming to visit us at Domaine du Garinet, and in fact the major part of our production is sold direct from here.  Between 1st June  & 30th September we are open every day from 11.00am to 6.30pm, except Sunday morning when you can find us at our stall in Montcuq market.  Outside the summer season, we are often around the property, but it is better to phone us if you are coming from any distance.

Click here for a location map

Vine growing

Our vines are situated on particularly well-drained and sheltered hillside sites on a limey clay soil containing a good proportion of stones.  These assist both drainage and heat retention - important conditions for growing quality grapes.

We believe very strongly that quality comes largely from the vineyard – the winemaking can to some extent make up for shortcomings in the grapes in difficult years, but the potential is fixed by the quality of the grapes that are picked.   Of course, the winemaking techniques have to be both sound and creative if the maximum potential is to be achieved, even with the best grapes.   We aim to keep abreast of new ideas that may help us to improve our quality, and this results in us sometimes doing things a bit differently from other Cahors vineyards.

We grow our vines considerably higher than is usual in this region to obtain the optimal leaf area needed to ripen the quantity of grapes that we harvest.  The yield is controlled by pruning, shoot thinning and, in most years, removal of excess crop in the early summer (vendange en vert), a rather dispiriting, onerous task but absolutely essential for high quality!

Mike at work

Protecting the Vines

We are not an organic vineyard, but we do practice a very cautious approach to spraying.  This means doing it only when there is an evident need (no spraying ‘just in case’ there might be a problem).  We select very carefully which products to use, on the basis of their effectiveness, but especially to minimise environmental impact and damage to useful insects.   This approach is known as ‘lutte raisonée’ or ‘lutte intégrale’ in French.  We agree wholeheartedly with the aims of the organic movement but we sometimes diverge from them in how these aims are best achieved.

Winemaking

As with vinegrowing, we make great efforts to keep abreast of the latest developments in    techniques, both in France and in the wider world.  We experiment with new methods when they are appropriate for our grapes and the style of wine we wish to make, but our goal is to produce distinctive wines of excellent quality which reflect both the terroir and the traditions of French winemaking  – we are not trying to make New World style wines.

Our Wines

Cahors AOC (Appellation d'Origine Controlée)

We produce three styles of red wine - our Cahors Fût de Chêne is aged in barrels of French oak for about 14 months and bottled some 18 months after the harvest.  One quarter of the barrels are new each year.  The Réserve is aged in older barrels and has the roundness provided by barrel aging, but with only faint oak character in the taste.  Finally our Classique Cahors is aged in vats and bottled relatively early.  All these wines have the same intrinsic quality because they are made from the same original wine – only the aging methods are different.

All our Cahors is made 100% from the malbec grape (also called cot noir and, locally, auxerrois).  In France, this variety is almost unique to the Cahors area, but it is widely grown in Argentina, and also in Chile.  Our wines have an extremely dark colour, and are rich and concentrated, but also relatively tannic when young.  Our overriding aim is to achieve the maximum fruit in our wine, to balance the natural tannin content of the malbec grape. 

This makes them particularly suitable to drink with rich meaty dishes, (cassoulet for example), and especially meat such as duck, goose or game.  With such dishes, the tannin ‘cuts’ the richness and provides the ideal counterfoil to the food.

All the wines will age well for up to at least 8 years in good vintages.  The barrel aged wines start life rather more rounded than the Classique, and the Fût de Chêne has the characteristic vanilla and smoky overtones of the oak.  In time these will marry with the fruit and become much less obvious, while still contributing to the complexity of the flavour.  By contrast, the Classique when young has stronger and more pronounced fruit flavours.  

As they get older, all the wines become softer and more complex and the flavour will linger longer in the mouth – at the same time the flavour will become less immediate and less obviously fruity.  Which you prefer is a matter of personal taste and it’s perfectly reasonable to like both old and young wine, for drinking with different kinds of food. Our policy is to hold sufficient stocks of our red wines to be able to offer them for sale with enough bottle age to be really enjoyable.  In most vintages they will still have potential for some further aging.

Sue bottle stacking

Rosé

Each year we make a limited quantity of rosé.  Cool fermentation and the avoidance of air contact ensure a fruity and refreshing wine, excellent for summer drinking.   Our rosé is dry and relatively dark-coloured.  It’s an excellent aperitif wine and a very good choice with meat (barbecues) on a hot summer day when you may not want a heavy red – but it’s very versatile and good with fish and cheese too.

White

Some very high quality white wine is now being produced in the Lot. Although there is little tradition of making white wine in the area, there is now a growing interest and increasing plantings.  We have invested both in planting white vines on some of our AOC land, and also in the modern equipment needed for white vinification.  Dry white wine is now an important part of our offering.

As with our Cahors, we work for maximum quality and our wines are up to the level of many of the best AOC whites.   We are fully equipped for the production of really high quality white wine, with automatic temperature control and a modern fully programmable pneumatic press. We offer three white wines:

La Combe is fruity and aromatic, made from 100% sauvignon.   It has rather more weight and less acidity than most Loire sauvignons, with excellent balance and strong varietal character.

Le Clos is concentrated and rich, made from 100% chardonnay.  To emphasise the fruit and the character of the grape variety, it has no oak contact.

From the 2005 vintage we will be fermenting a small proportion of our chardonnay in oak barrels.  This wine is suave and rich with a discrete oak character fully married to the fruit.  White wine which has been fermented in oak barrels is very different from wine fermented in vats and subsequently aged in barrels, and equally has nothing in common with wine artificially ‘oaked’ using oak chips, sawdust or extracts.  This wine will be bottled separately and we will continue to produce Le Clos as above without any oak contact.

Walnuts

We produce excellent quality walnuts.  You can buy them whole, or as shelled kernels, and we produce a fine quality walnut oil.  We also make a range of walnut based bread and gâteaux that you can buy at the Sunday market in Montcuq.

Prunes

We have a small plum orchard which produces a limited quantity of prunes.  We sell them as prunes ‘ready to eat’, or in the form of various preserves, all made by us at Domaine du Garinet.

Obtaining our Products

Most of our sales are made directly to customers who visit the property or Montcuq market, and we can accept mail or phone orders for delivery in France. Unfortunately, the administrative difficulties posed by customs and the cost of transport mean that it is not practical for us to deliver retail sales of wine elsewhere than in France.  However, our wine is carried by specialist wine merchants in several countries in Europe – please call or email us for contact details.

We can also deliver to a depot near Calais, where you can pick up your order at your convenience.   If you live in the UK, this service enables you to collect your order when you make a day trip to Calais, or if you are passing through Calais en route elsewhere.  Of course, if you bring wine back with you into the UK, you do not have to pay UK excise duty – a considerable saving.

 

Minkie in charge of the vines

If you are visiting South West France, we look forward to meeting you at Domaine du Garinet.  You are assured of a warm welcome.

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Domaine du Garinet
46800 Le Boulvé
France