Why are wineries moving to the city?

Large stainless steel vats line up under the framework. In this 400-square-meter former warehouse, there are also cubic concrete containers, barrels and bottles of chenin or grolleau that have been opened for tastings. Pauline Lair is the winemaker at this clean-cut Loire winery. She has been making wine here since 2021. Nothing extravagant so far. You have to want to get there to grasp the uniqueness of the place. From Angers train station, the interactive map shows 13 minutes. On foot. Pauline has opted for an installation in an urban winery.

In a dozen or so French towns, winemakers have found premises in which to raise wine, just as they would open a bakery with a bakehouse in the back. Given the geographical remoteness of the vineyards, micro-trading is almost a prerequisite. The grapes used to make the wine are purchased from a third party. At theend of the harvest, they are transported to town by refrigerated lorry over varying distances .

Paul Stefanaggi

Pauline Lair has linked up with twelve partner winegrowers along the Loire, the same ones since the beginning. "Fromspring to harvest, one week a month, I visit each of them. I follow the evolution of the grapes, I'm not disconnected from what I'm getting, I don't vinify blindly." Vinifying other people's grapes allows her to dilute the risk of climatic hazards. Frost or hail will not ,a priori,condemn all the plots, spread out from Muscadet to Forez, via Anjou and Touraine. Above all, Pauline is delighted with this broad "playground". Twelve grape varieties and a host of terroirs to juggle with in winemaking .

Window shopping in Bordeaux

In Bordeaux, Laurent Bordes also dreamed of flexibility. "The wine world was asleep in my region. After fifteen years in the business (vineyard and cellar technician, then consultant oenologist, editor's note), I wanted to leave it for the world of beer. The microbreweries set up directly in town seemed to be having a ball with their ephemeral vintages and colorful labels. I said to myself, why not do it with wine?" The Chais du Port de la Lune was born, the first urban winery in Bordeaux.

Nicolas Mathys

After six years in a former bunker, Laurent is inaugurating a new building more in the city center this year. "Our bottling service provider could no longer park out front, so we had to equip ourselves with a bottling machine, a one-ton machine that was placed on the sidewalk.I had to completely dismantle it to get it inside," says Laurent, illustrating the constraints of an urban installation.
In return, tourists can easily lick the window and buy wine. Urban wineries base part of their business on tasting workshops, tours and other wine tourism activities. A "first step towards the vineyard" that we might dare to take next time, say Laurent and Pauline.

Concentrated wine near Lyon

And what if setting up a winery in the city implied yet another logic? Géraldine Dubois is a winegrower and an exception in the urban winery landscape. She grows her vines, harvests the grapes and makes her own wine. The trump card up her sleeve: her plots are located just 20 km from downtown Lyon, in the Coteaux des Lyonnais, a dynamic vineyard on the outskirts of the metropolis .

Since 2021, the winery has been located in a charming alleyway in a busy neighborhood. It is not open to the public without an appointment and does not offer sales in the cellar. So, why choose the city?To limit transportation," she says with determination. In my past experiences as a winegrower, I noticed that we were making efforts in the vineyard by working organically, and in the cellar by doing very little. But when it came to marketing, nothing seemed to matter ecologically, and the bottles were exported to the other end of France or the world. "

©Loïs Nagir

The small size of its production means that it can be sold and delivered by bicycle to the many restaurateurs in the gastronomic capital. In addition to optimizing logistics, Géraldine is tackling another project that weighs heavily on the carbon balance of winegrowers and winemakers: the glass bottle. This proximity to the place of consumption makes the deposit system effective. 90% of its bottles are reused. "Three years later, 1,000 new bottles have enabled me to sell 10,000 bottles of wine."
"It all takes time.Sure, it's easier to send everything to New York," she says realistically, without any irony or sarcasm. "I'm aware that it's not adaptable everywhere, but it at least allows us to question ourselves. "