THE STORY OF OUR ENCOUNTER

• Régis Lansade and Robert Saléon-Terras have come a long way – literally as well as figuratively. They travelled for 15 years with Médecins Sans Fontières, first meeting in Afghanistan in 1984. Their friendship was forged in a daily existence of dirt and fear, of blood and sorrow and of wild, incredible hope. Even if neither of them talks much about this period, images of war still haunt them - as do memories of small simple pleasures experienced with an intensity that it is sometimes hard to find over here.

• It was during this period that Médecins Sans Frontières set up clandestine hospitals in the Afghan mountains in order to help a civilian population devastated by a long war.
www.msf.fr


• The story of one of their MSF missions to Afghanistan is told in a comic strip : “ Le Photographe” by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre et Frédéric Lemercier , collection Aire Libre.
www.lephotographe.dupuis.com
www.evene.fr/celebre/biographie/emmanuel-guibert

The black and white photographs on our website were taken by the photographer in question, Didier Lefèvre , a very close friend , who sadly died in 2007.
www.imagesandco.com

THE STORY OF OUR CONVERSION TO WINE

• 1989 and for Régis came the time for marriage and children. Difficult for him, however, to contemplate settling back into a French hospital and, on the advice of his doctor wife, he decided instead to study oenology at Bordeaux University. His conversion to wine was well under way.

• Come 1990 and it was Robert’s turn to marry and start a family. He, however, remained faithful to medicine and subsequently spent the next 11 years careering round the mountains of his natal Ardèche following in the footsteps of his family doctor.

• So, while Robert Saléon-Terras was running from morning to night, from village to village, come rain or shine, Régis Lansade, nurse, became the consultant oenologist for Bergerac’s Inter-professional Regional Wine Board, the ‘CIVRB’.

And jolly happy they were too!

THE STORY OF OUR VINEYARD

• While working in his advisory capacity at the CIVRB, Régis met a man named Jean Rouby, owner of 1, 14 hectares of vines in the Pécharmant appellation. Two years later Jean Rouby decided to sell. And Régis Lansade decided to buy… Les Chemins d’Orient and a new adventure were born.

• During the 70s when Robert was a student doctor in Dijon, he used to harvest and help vinify on a Vosne-Romanée Burgundy estate; the idea of eventually making his own wine was sown during this period and as time went by the idea developed and grew. So, when in the summer of 2000 the Salèon-Terras family holidayed with the Lanslade family in Bergerac, what did they talk about? What else but vines and wine?

• Encouraged by Régis’ experience with Les Chemins d’Orient, Robert decided it was high time to study for a vocational baccalaureate in viticulture and oenology, which he duly did at Blanquefort. Abandoning his Ardèche patients, he set off in search of a small vineyard in the Côtes du Rhone.

• Robert and Régis’s separation was short lived: Robert could not find anything suitable in the south east of France and so when Régis had the opportunity of buying a further 2.5 hectares of vines in Pécharmant, he suggested it to Robert. Robert did not hesitate and bought the vines immediately. It now seemed obvious for the two of them to begin working together with the land owned separately but the fruit held in common. On one point they are adamant: their vision is a shared one.

• Next followed a time of building. The winery, or chai; the barrel shed. Neither Robert or Régis planned to stint; they fully intended making wine in the best technical conditions possible, choosing small, conical, stainless steel, made-to-measure tanks; manual harvesting; traditional wine-making methods.