This is a cross section of the caves under the Domaine Lois Louise vineyard. The problem posed by a large vineyard is how to vinify 150 tons of grapes without losing the intimate wine-making style practiced at Domaine du Docteur Rodgers. The answer is to construct 56 small-scale wineries, each independent from each other. The caves are built at different heights to allow gravity flow of wine from one cave to another, just as we do in our small-scale winery. The top cave contains 56 fermenters, each one capable of making eight barrels of wine. For every fermenter there are eight unique barrels in the barrel cave and 10 unique bottle bins in the bottling cave. The winemaking process for each of the small fermenters is identical to the state-of-the-art practice developed since 1996 at Domaine du Docteur Rodgers (building on the fundamental work of Ouvrard at DRC). The process couldn’t be more natural. The grapes are handpicked from the vineyards above the winery and then dropped from the sorting pad through a stainless steel chute directly into the tanks in the winery. After a foot-crushing and a native-yeast fermentation, the wines are siphoned by gravity to new François Fréres barrels in the barrel cave. Eighteen months later, the wine is siphoned from the barrels to a gravity-fed bottling machine in the bottling cave.

Approximately four years after the grapes are dropped by gravity into the fermentation cave, the wine has flowed slowly downward 28’8” through three caves in the mountain, to re-emerge bottled on a shipping pallet from the bottling cave.