The Domaine des Ardoisières did more than simply bring Savoie into the spotlight. It restored a part of its memory.
Long before it became a winter sports destination, the steep slopes of the Tarentaise Valley were covered with vines. For centuries, the schist hillsides of Cevins and Saint-Pierre-de-Soucy shaped a mountain viticulture among the most spectacular in Europe. Then the terraces were abandoned. The forest reclaimed its rights, almost completely erasing all traces of the vineyard.
By the late 1990s, many considered this heritage definitively lost. Michel Grisard, however, refused to accept this fate. With a handful of enthusiasts, he undertook a titanic task: clearing the hillsides, rebuilding dry stone walls, reopening ancient paths, and replanting vines where no one imagined wine could ever be produced again.
When Brice Omont took over the estate in 2010, he didn't seek to reinvent the project. He gave it new depth. Trained in agronomy, convinced that great wines are born first from observing living organisms, he pursued this rebirth with rare demanding standards. The vines are managed biodynamically, treatments are reduced to the strict minimum, and harvesting is entirely manual. Here, no mechanization is possible. Each row is climbed on foot, each crate is carried down by hand. The mountain dictates its rhythm.
But this constraint becomes a signature.
The schists of Cevins, the schistose marls of Saint-Pierre-de-Soucy, the altitude, the thermal amplitudes, and the Alpine winds create wines of striking precision. The historical grape varieties of Savoie — Jacquère, Altesse, Mondeuse Blanche, Persan, Mondeuse Noire — regain an intensity rarely found elsewhere. Vinifications remain discreet, and aging extends the terroir without ever masking it.
The whites impress with their verticality. They seem carved from rock: a taut, saline texture, traversed by an almost electrical energy. The reds play a completely different tune. Far from the rustic caricatures long associated with the region, they combine finesse, depth, and freshness, with remarkably delicate tannins.
Domaine des Ardoisières has become one of the absolute benchmarks of mountain viticulture. Not because it seeks to impress, but because it lets the landscape speak with disarming clarity. Each bottle tells the story of the slope, the stone, the wind, and the long passage of time. Wines that seem to have always existed, yet are born from a vineyard that had to be almost entirely reborn.
