Collection: Les Justices

Sophie and Clément Maire-Kurdziel live and make their wines from a carefully chosen set of parcels surrounding Chinon and Saumur in the Loire Valley.

They met and fell in love at an oenology school in Montpellier. They spent their subsequent years travelling as stagieres in New Zealand, Lebanon, the US, and Australia before settling in the Loire.

Les Justices was the name of the first vineyard of Cabernet Franc they bought. The low-yielding vines were planted in 1947 on almost pure clay soils and immediately became the heart of their new project and its namesake.

After releasing the first vintage of Les Justices in 2018, they rented more vines and now produce another Cabernet Franc from Saint-Cyr en Bourg, La Bamboche; they took a plot of Chenin in Turquant and another parcel of Cabernet Franc in the Saumur-Champigny appellation.

They added even more vines in 2021, including some from the famed Les Poyeaux lieu-dit, made famous by the eponymous cuvée from Clos Rougeard. Today, they farm 2 hectares of their vines and purchase grapes from another 3 hectares grown by local farmers (always organic). During harvest, vinification, and élevage, everything is done by hand and with as little intervention as possible: hand harvesting, indigenous yeasts, gentle macerations, and only rarely adding small amounts of SO2 at bottling.