Château Gilbert & Gaillard

Château Gilbert & Gaillard is the result of a professor of geology and a major wine distributor’s sales director quitting their jobs thirty years ago to become the famed French wine authors they are today. After decades of publishing authoritative guides to French terroir, they’ve founded their own domaine in Saint-Chinian!

François Gilbert & Philippe Gaillard are familiar names to lovers of French wine. They have published dozens of books and magazines on the topic and their annual guides to the best domaines across the country have directed countless visitors’ steps.

G&G’s line of organic table wines from the Languedoc’s Saint-Chinian AOC are farmed beautifully with integrated management of sheep, bats, honeybees, and horse plowing to achieve healthy fruit that leaves an imprint of its place rather than its treatments and contortions.

The domaine occupies 30 hectares, scattered plots embedded entirely within a nationally protected Natura 2000 wilderness preserve protecting the signature garrigue ecology of southern France. Their vineyard parcels are patchworked into this famed shrubland so rich in thyme, rosemary, junipers, wild fennel, and pine trees, which exude their natural oils into the wind and gather on the nearby grape skins like a signature of this bucolic eden.
The whole area seems pulled right from a late Van Gogh landscape.

These lovely vineyards are tended traditionally and organically by veteran farmer Yves Tichit and cellared by vigneronne Marine Faugier with the gentlest approach.

Together this team is delivering deeply satisfying, terroir specific wines.

François Gilbert boasts a doctorate in geology, being among the first to apply the study of geology specifically to viticultural terroir. After having worked as a professor for 15 years, Dr. Gilbert decided to devote himself full time to his passion for wine. Meanwhile, Philippe Gaillard, having grown up in Touraine in a family of winegrowers and studying wine, was working as the sales director of a major French wine distributor. But in 1989, François and Philippe decided to join forces, leave their comfy gigs, and strike out as Gilbert & Gaillard! The rest is history—over three decades they’ve shared their expertise with we the thirsty denizens of French wine. Their English language magazine is now published and distributed on five continents, and that knowledge and palate comes to bear on their pet wine project: Château Gilbert & Gaillard.

The terroir of Château Gilbert & Gaillard is exceptional. Located in the middle of a 3000 hectare park classified Natura 2000, it unfolds its clay-limestone slopes between 150 and 200 meters above sea-level. The soils of the Eocene (early Tertiary) are deep and extremely stony here, allowing the vines excellent rooting to protect them from summer drought and water stress. The environment gives pride of place to that patently French ‘garrigue’ ecology of the southern coast. The Mediterranean climate here guarantees generous sunshine, sufficient rainfall especially in autumn, and above all the frequent presence of the north wind, the famous ‘Cers’, which, because it ventilates the vines three days out of four, allows for minimalist farming. The conditions are simply ideal for producing healthy, ripe, and expressive grapes.

These two globetrotting tasters and their team have given us fantastic centre-cut examples of Saint-Chinian showing typicity and giving pleasure, food friendly drops that spin the hands of the clock over long meandering meals. Santé, à la vôtre, tchin-tchin, mes amis!