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White wine over ice, is it really so wrong?

Ask a sommelier whether you should put ice in your white wine and brace yourself for the reaction. Wine culture can be wonderfully earnest about its rules, and few transgressions provoke quite such a sharp intake of breath as the ice cube in the glass.

Here in the south of France, we have a different perspective.

When July arrives in Pinet and the temperature climbs past 35°C, when the garrigue shimmers in the heat and the lagoon turns to hammered silver, a glass of white wine served at the textbook 8–10°C is a pleasant thing. A glass of white wine poured over ice, in a garden, in the shade of an olive tree, with friends, that is something else entirely. That is summer.

The argument against ice is reasonable enough: it dilutes the wine as it melts, muting the finer aromas and flavours you have paid to enjoy. And for a complex, aged white wine, that argument holds. Don't put ice in a ten-year-old Burgundy. Nobody is suggesting that.

But a young, crisp white wine from Pinet, one built around the vivid acidity of Piquepoul Blanc, or the clean citrus freshness of Sauvignon Blanc, is not a fragile thing. It is a wine designed for exactly this kind of moment. A cube or two will keep it cold longer than a warm afternoon would allow, and the minimal dilution is a fair trade for a glass that stays refreshing from first sip to last.

There is also a practical case. White wine warms quickly in a glass on a hot day. Ice counters that. And if the alternative is drinking a warm glass out of politeness to convention, the convention can wait.

My suggestion: use one or two large cubes rather than a handful of small ones, larger ice melts more slowly and dilutes less. Keep the wine well chilled to begin with so you need less ice. And choose a wine that leans towards freshness and acidity rather than weight and oak, which, conveniently, describes everything we make at Domaine Romain Julbe.

So this summer, if the temperature demands it and the moment calls for it, go ahead. Pour it over ice. The wine will be fine, and so will you.

À votre santé.

At what temperature should you serve white and red wine?

Wine temperature is one of those subjects where received wisdom has quietly drifted from the truth, and most people are serving their wines at least a few degrees away from where they should be. Let us set the record straight.

White wine: colder than you're drinking it, warmer than your fridge

A domestic refrigerator runs at around 4°C. That is excellent for keeping food fresh and deeply unkind to white wine. Served straight from the fridge, a white wine is so cold that its aromas are suppressed, you are drinking the shape of the wine without its character. Like listening to music with the treble turned all the way down.

The ideal serving temperature for a crisp, fresh white wine, the kind we make at Domaine Romain Julbe from Piquepoul and Sauvignon Blanc grapes, is 8–11°C. Cold enough to feel refreshing, warm enough to let the aromas breathe. A practical approach: take the bottle from the fridge 10–15 minutes before you pour. That small wait makes a noticeable difference.

Fuller-bodied white wines with some oak or age to them, a white Burgundy, for example, can be served slightly warmer, around 11–13°C, where their complexity has more room to express itself.

Red wine: warmer than your cellar, cooler than your room

Now for the bigger misconception. You have almost certainly been told that red wine should be served at "room temperature." This was true when the phrase was coined, in the cool stone rooms and cellars of 19th century France and England, where room temperature hovered somewhere between 16–18°C. It was never intended to describe a centrally heated modern home in January at 22°C, or a sun-warmed dining room in July at 25°C.

A red wine served too warm loses its structure. The alcohol becomes aggressive and forward, the fruit turns jammy, and the wine feels flat and heavy rather than alive. The ideal temperature for most red wines is 14–18°C, which, in practice, means a light to medium red is often better served slightly chilled.

This surprises people. But try it: put a bottle of light red, a Beaujolais, a Pinot Noir, a young Languedoc rouge, in the fridge for 20 minutes before serving. Pour it at around 14°C and notice how the freshness lifts, how the fruit becomes more precise, how the whole thing feels more drinkable. You are not breaking any rules. You are following the original ones.

Fuller reds, a Bordeaux, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, a structured Languedoc blend, are better at the warmer end of the range, 16–18°C. But even these benefit from being kept out of a warm room before serving.

A simple guide

Wine styleIdeal serving temperaturePractical tipSparkling wine6–8°CServe straight from fridgeLight, fresh white wine8–11°CRemove from fridge 10–15 mins before pouringFuller white / aged white11–13°CRemove from fridge 20–30 mins before pouringRosé8–12°CRemove from fridge 10 mins before pouringLight red wine12–14°C20 mins in the fridge before servingMedium red wine14–16°CServe from a cool room or brief fridge chillFull-bodied red wine16–18°CServe from a cool cellar or room

Temperature is not a rule invented to intimidate. It is simply the difference between tasting a wine as it was made to be tasted, and missing half of what is in the glass. A few degrees in either direction is all it takes.

À votre santé.

Why are winemakers reducing sulphites, and should you care?

If you have spent any time reading wine labels in recent years, you will have noticed a quiet shift. More and more producers are advertising "low sulphites", "minimal intervention" or "made without added sulphites." It has become something of a selling point, but what does it actually mean, and why does it matter?

What are sulphites and what do they do?

Sulphites, or sulphur dioxide (SO₂), are compounds that occur naturally in wine as a byproduct of fermentation. They are also added by winemakers at various stages of production as a preservative and antioxidant. Sulphites do two useful things: they kill unwanted bacteria and wild yeasts that might spoil the wine, and they slow oxidation, helping the wine stay fresh during transport and storage.

In other words, sulphites have been a cornerstone of commercial winemaking for centuries. They work. They are effective, inexpensive, and well understood.

So why are winemakers reducing them?

The case for going lower

The honest answer is that sulphites, used heavily, are a shortcut. They allow grapes of inconsistent quality to produce a stable, predictable wine. They forgive imprecision in the cellar. A winemaker who relies heavily on sulphites can compensate for fruit that was harvested too early, handled carelessly, or processed in less than ideal conditions.

A winemaker who commits to using minimal sulphites has nowhere to hide. The grapes must be excellent. The harvesting must be careful. The cellar work must be meticulous. Every stage of production needs to be cleaner, more precise, and more attentive, because the chemical safety net has been reduced.

This is why low-sulphite wines, when they are good, tend to be very good. They are the product of producers who have chosen the harder path because they believe in what they are making.

There is also a growing body of evidence, though the science is still evolving, that high sulphite levels in wine contribute to certain adverse reactions in sensitive individuals. Headaches the morning after drinking, digestive discomfort, and the sense that some wines simply feel heavier than others may, for some people, be connected to sulphite load rather than alcohol alone. The EU requires all wines containing more than 10mg/litre of sulphites to carry the label "contains sulphites", which is to say, almost every commercial wine on the market.

Reducing sulphites is not a trend or a marketing strategy for producers who take it seriously. It is a commitment to better raw materials, stricter process, and a wine that sits more gently on the body.

What it means at Domaine Romain Julbe

This is something I think about practically, not philosophically. My rotating press method, which minimises the exposure of juice to oxygen during pressing, reduces the need for sulphites at the critical early stage of production. Cleaner fruit handled carefully requires less chemical protection. The result is a wine with lower sulphite levels than most commercially produced equivalents, without sacrificing stability or shelf life.

Guests who have visited the domaine and tasted our wines often remark on how they feel the next morning, or rather, how they don't feel the way they might expect to after an equivalent amount of wine. That is difficult to prove scientifically at an individual level, but it is consistent feedback, and it reflects what I set out to achieve.

Should you specifically seek out low-sulphite wines?

If you have no particular sensitivity to sulphites, the difference may be subtle. But if you have ever noticed that some wines seem to agree with you more than others, or that certain bottles reliably produce a heaviness you can't entirely attribute to quantity, it is worth experimenting with lower-sulphite options and paying attention to how your body responds.

And if you simply want wine made by a producer who has chosen quality over convenience at every step of the process, that is reason enough.

À votre santé.

, Romain Julbe, Pinet

Why is there no single "correct" way to plant and prune a grapevine?

Ask ten vignerons how to prune a vine and you will receive at least twelve answers. Some will tell you that Guyot is the only sensible system. Others will swear by Gobelet. A few will describe methods so particular to their own land and family tradition that they barely have a name. All of them will be convinced they are right, and most of them will be.

This is not confusion. It is viticulture working exactly as it should.

The vine as a response to place

A grapevine is not a machine that produces a predictable output when given standardised inputs. It is a living plant in continuous dialogue with its environment, the soil beneath it, the air around it, the light above it, the hands that work it. The way a vine is planted and pruned shapes everything: how much fruit it produces, how that fruit develops, how the plant ages, and ultimately what ends up in the glass.

The challenge is that no two vineyards are identical. A pruning system that works brilliantly on a steep, north-facing slope with poor rocky soil would be entirely wrong for a flat, fertile plain. A method designed for a cool, rainy climate would stress a vine in the arid heat of the Mediterranean south. The vine doesn't know what system the textbook recommends. It responds to what is done to it in the context of where it grows.

The main systems, and why each one exists

Gobelet, the oldest method, and the one you will see in the older vineyards of the Languedoc and the southern Rhône. The vine is trained as a low, free-standing bush with no support wires. Multiple short arms radiate from a central trunk, each bearing a short spur with a few buds. It looks almost sculptural, ancient and self-contained. Gobelet works beautifully in hot, dry climates because the canopy shades the grapes from intense sun and the low vine stays close to heat retained in the soil overnight. It requires more skilled hand labour than most modern systems and is increasingly rare simply because it cannot be mechanised.

Guyot, the most common system in France and much of the wine world. A single long cane (or two in double Guyot) is trained horizontally along support wires. It is efficient, it works well with mechanical harvesting, and it gives the winemaker good control over yield. It suits a wide range of climates and has become the default for this reason. It is not, however, always optimal, a vine grown on a rich soil in a warm climate on Guyot will often produce too much fruit too easily, diluting quality.

Cordon de Royat, a permanent horizontal arm trained along a wire, with short spurs bearing the fruiting wood each year. Common in the Rhône and increasingly in the Languedoc. More structured than Gobelet, less flexible than Guyot. Good for consistent results over many years once the vine is established.

High training systems, found in Austria, parts of Italy, and some New World regions. Vines trained high on tall support structures to maximise air circulation and reduce disease pressure. Entirely impractical in a traditional Languedoc context but logical in humid climates where mildew is a constant threat.

And then there is the human factor

Beyond climate and soil, there is tradition. In many French appellations, the pruning method is partially or entirely dictated by the appellation regulations themselves, the rules that govern how wine from that area must be made if it is to carry the regional name. Picpoul de Pinet AOP, for example, has specific requirements around vine training, density, and yield. These rules exist to protect the character of the appellation but they also mean that a vigneron's "choice" of pruning system is sometimes not entirely a choice.

And then there is everything the regulations don't prescribe, the precise angle of the cut, how many buds to leave on each spur, which canes to remove entirely and which to retain, how to respond to a vine that is stressed or diseased or simply old and unpredictable. This is where experience and instinct matter as much as technique. It is learned through seasons, not studied from books.

Pruning as a conversation

The reason there is no single correct method is the same reason there is no single correct way to manage any living system in a complex environment. The vine changes. The season changes. The soil changes over decades. The vigneron changes, in skill, in philosophy, in what they are trying to achieve with the wine.

Pruning is not a technical procedure applied uniformly to a passive object. It is a conversation between the grower and the plant, shaped by everything that came before and everything hoped for in the vintage ahead. The best vignerons I know prune not by system but by observation, reading each vine individually before deciding what it needs.

That is slow, expensive, and impossible to scale. It is also the difference between a vineyard that produces wine reflecting a place, and one that produces wine reflecting a method.

In Pinet, I try to do the former.

, Romain Julbe, Pinet

Why do vignerons still prune by hand when machines can harvest the grapes?

It is a reasonable question. If mechanical harvesters can strip an entire vineyard in a matter of hours, doing in a morning what might take a team of pickers several days, why do most serious wine producers still send human beings out into the vines with secateurs in February, row by row, vine by vine, in conditions that nobody would describe as pleasant?

The answer is not sentiment. It is biology.

What a machine can and cannot see

A mechanical harvester is very good at one thing: removing ripe fruit from a vine efficiently and at scale. It shakes the canopy, collects what falls, and moves on. For certain wine styles, high-volume, commercially consistent, price-sensitive, it is entirely appropriate. The technology has improved enormously and the best modern harvesters cause less damage to fruit than was once assumed.

But a harvester has no judgement. It cannot look at a cluster and decide it needs another four days on the vine. It cannot identify a patch of mildew and work around it. It cannot distinguish between a grape that is perfectly ripe and one that is not quite there yet. It processes everything in front of it with complete democratic indifference.

Pruning requires something different entirely. It requires a decision at every single vine.

Why pruning cannot be mechanised, not really

There are mechanical pruning aids, devices that make rough cuts faster, and they are used on large estates where scale makes any labour saving worthwhile. But what they produce is a rough approximation that must then be corrected by hand. The fundamental act of pruning, deciding which wood to keep, which to remove, how many buds to leave, how to respond to the particular condition of this particular vine on this particular day, cannot currently be delegated to a machine.

Each vine in a vineyard is an individual. It has its own age, its own vigour, its own history of stress and disease and previous growing seasons. A vine that produced heavily last year may need a harder pruning this year to recover its balance. A young vine needs to be managed conservatively to build root depth. An old vine pruned too aggressively may never fully recover. These are judgements made in seconds by an experienced hand, multiplied across thousands of vines, every winter.

Get it right and you set the vine up for the season ahead, controlling yield, directing energy into the remaining buds, managing the long-term health of the plant. Get it wrong and you pay the price in September, in the quality of the harvest, in the wine that eventually reaches the bottle.

The deeper reason, time horizon

Mechanical harvesting optimises for this year's vintage. You get the fruit off efficiently, you process it, you move on. The vine's long-term health is not the machine's concern.

Pruning by hand is an investment in the next ten, twenty, thirty years of the vineyard's life. Old vines, the ones that produce the most concentrated, characterful fruit, exist because generations of vignerons before us made careful decisions each winter about which wood to keep. They were not thinking about the next harvest. They were thinking about the next decade.

This is one of the genuinely distinctive things about viticulture as a form of agriculture: it operates on a timescale that almost no other food production does. The decisions made in a vineyard today will shape wines that do not yet exist, drunk by people who are not yet thinking about wine. Pruning by hand is how you honour that timescale, and how you protect it.

And then there is this

Spend a morning pruning a row of old Gobelet vines in Pinet, the kind of gnarled, low-slung plants that have been in the ground for forty or fifty years, and the question of whether it should be done by machine answers itself. Each plant has a shape that has developed over decades, an architecture built by every pruning decision that came before yours. You are not applying a technique. You are continuing a conversation.

A harvester is a useful tool. It solves a logistics problem at a specific moment in the year. Pruning is something else. It is the work that determines what kind of vigneron you are, and what kind of wine you will make, long before a single grape is ripe.

, Romain Julbe, Pinet

Why do some vineyards keep weeds between the vines, and others don't?

If you have driven through wine country in the south of France, you will have noticed that vineyards do not all look the same. Some have bare, clean soil between the rows, almost manicured, with nothing growing except the vines themselves. Others are thick with grass, wildflowers, and what the tidy-minded might call weeds. Both approaches are deliberate. Both have their advocates. And the choice between them says quite a lot about how a producer thinks about wine.

The case for bare soil

For most of the twentieth century, bare soil between the rows was the standard. Herbicides made it easy to achieve and maintain. The logic was straightforward: eliminate competition. Weeds and grasses consume water and nutrients that would otherwise be available to the vine. In a hot, dry region like the Languedoc, where rainfall is already limited, why share resources with plants you did not choose to grow?

There is also a practical argument around temperature. Bare soil absorbs heat during the day and releases it overnight, which can be beneficial in keeping vines warm during vulnerable periods in spring and early autumn.

This approach works. It produces consistent results, it is manageable at scale, and it reduces one variable in an already unpredictable system.

The case for keeping the cover

The shift in thinking over the past two decades has been significant, and it has not been driven by fashion. It has been driven by observation, of what happens to soil that is kept permanently bare, and what happens to soil that is not.

Soil is not simply a growing medium. It is a living ecosystem. A healthy agricultural soil contains billions of microorganisms per teaspoon, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, forming a complex web that breaks down organic matter, fixes nitrogen, suppresses disease, and creates the conditions in which plant roots can genuinely thrive. These organisms need organic matter to feed on. They need roots to colonise. They need, in short, something growing.

Permanently bare soil, particularly soil maintained with herbicides, gradually loses this biological complexity. It compacts. It becomes less permeable to water. It erodes. Over time, a vineyard managed this way requires increasingly heavy inputs, fertilisers, treatments, interventions, to maintain productivity, because the natural systems that once provided those functions have been disrupted or eliminated.

Cover crops, the grasses, legumes, wildflowers and yes, weeds that grow between the rows, maintain and rebuild that biological activity. Their roots break up compacted soil and improve drainage. When they die or are cut back, they add organic matter. Legumes fix atmospheric nitrogen directly into the soil, reducing or eliminating the need for artificial fertilisers. And a biologically diverse soil, increasingly, appears to contribute to the complexity and distinctiveness of the wine produced from vines grown in it, though the precise mechanisms are still being understood.

The competition question, revisited

The objection remains: aren't cover crops competing with the vines for water in an already dry climate?

Yes, and up to a point, that is the intention.

A vine that has to work for its water sends its roots deeper. It explores more soil volume, accessing minerals and trace elements from further down the profile. A vine with easy access to surface water and nutrients at shallow depth is a lazy vine, high yielding, perhaps, but producing fruit that lacks the concentration and complexity of one that has genuinely had to reach for what it needs.

Managed intelligently, cut back in late spring before the driest months, allowed to regrow after harvest, cover crops can improve the vine's long-term performance rather than undermining it. The key word is managed. This is not a passive approach. It requires attention and judgement, like most things in the vineyard that are worth doing.

What it looks like in practice, and what it means

A vineyard with diverse ground cover between the rows is almost always a sign of a producer thinking long-term. It reflects a decision to work with the soil's natural systems rather than against them, to accept more complexity and more work in exchange for a healthier vineyard over time.

It is also, frankly, more beautiful. A vineyard in flower in May, with poppies and clover and wild grasses between the rows, is a different thing entirely to a vineyard of bare earth. Whether that beauty belongs in the discussion about wine quality is debatable. But it is one of the small pleasures of working land you intend to look after for a long time.

In Pinet, I manage my vineyard rows with cover crops between the vines, cutting back before the summer dry season and allowing natural regeneration in autumn. The soil is alive, the vines work for their resources, and the wines, I believe, reflect both.

, Romain Julbe, Pinet

Why small batch wine is different, and why it matters who made it

There is a moment that every serious wine buyer eventually reaches. It arrives after a few years of exploring, after the reliable supermarket bottles, the celebrated appellations, the highly scored labels, when you realise that what you are actually looking for is not a wine. It is a winemaker.

That shift in thinking is the beginning of something interesting.

What "small batch" actually means

The term gets used loosely, so it is worth being precise. A small batch wine is not simply a wine made in small quantities, though that is usually true. It is a wine made by a producer for whom every decision matters in a way it simply cannot at scale.

A large négociant blending hundreds of thousands of bottles across a region has one overriding priority: consistency. The wine must taste the same this year as last year, because that is what the market expects and what the brand depends upon. Variation is a problem to be solved. The tools for solving it, blending across large volumes, technological interventions, heavy use of preservatives, are effective, but they come at a cost. The cost is character.

A small batch producer has a different relationship with their wine. When your total production is measured in thousands of bottles rather than millions, every vintage is a distinct event. The particular character of that year, the late spring, the dry August, the rain that arrived in September, is present in the bottle. You are not drinking a brand. You are drinking a year, a place, and the decisions of a specific human being who was there for all of it.

The economics of attention

Scale in winemaking, as in most things, trades attention for efficiency. A large operation cannot afford to prune every vine individually, to hand-harvest selectively, to make cellar decisions vine by vine and vat by vat. It processes at volume because volume is the model.

A small producer does not have the option of not paying attention. Every vine represents a meaningful fraction of the total harvest. A row harvested at the wrong moment, a vat handled carelessly, a bottling decision made too hastily, these are not rounding errors. They are the difference between a good vintage and a difficult one, between a wine that expresses the terroir and one that merely represents it.

This is why the best small batch wines tend to carry a kind of precision and intentionality that is difficult to find elsewhere. Not because the producer is more talented than a large operation's winemaking team, though sometimes they are, but because the economics of their situation demand that they be fully present at every stage.

What you are buying when you buy from an independent producer

You are buying the answer to a question: what does this specific piece of land, in this specific year, in the hands of this specific person, produce?

That question has no generic answer. It cannot be optimised into a formula or scaled into a corporate strategy. It is answered freshly each vintage, by a person who lives with the land year-round, who knows which corner of the vineyard holds moisture longest, which block always ripens a week ahead of the rest, which vat tends to ferment slowly and needs watching.

You are also buying continuity of purpose. An independent vigneron making wine from their own land has a stake in that land that extends far beyond the current vintage. The decisions they make this year, in the vineyard, in the cellar, are made with the next ten years in mind, and the ten after that. The vine they plant today will outlive them. That long-term thinking produces different wine from short-term production planning.

Why direct matters

When you buy directly from a small producer, whether visiting the domaine or ordering through their website, something else happens that is worth naming. The margin that would otherwise be distributed across importers, distributors, and retailers stays with the person who made the wine. For a small operation, this is not a trivial detail. It is often the difference between financial viability and otherwise. It directly funds the next vintage, the next planting, the next season of careful work.

It also means you can ask questions. What was the harvest like? What is different about this cuvée compared to last year? Which wine would you open first, and which would you keep for another two years? These are conversations that a label on a supermarket shelf cannot have with you. A vigneron can.

At Domaine Romain Julbe

We produce a small number of cuvées from our estate in Pinet, on the edge of the Étang de Thau in the heart of the Languedoc. Every bottle is the product of a single property, a single season, and one person making decisions in the vineyard and cellar from January through to bottling.

Our production is deliberately limited. Not as a marketing strategy, but because the land we farm has a finite capacity, and we have no interest in exceeding it. The vines determine what we make. We work around them, not the other way around.

If you are looking for a wine that tastes the same every year, predictable, consistent, reliably familiar, we are probably not the right producer for you, and we say that without criticism. Consistency has its place.

But if you want to taste what Pinet gave us this particular year, made by someone who spent that year in the vineyard and the cellar thinking of little else, we would be glad to be the wine in your glass.

, Romain Julbe, Pinet