| ABOUT
Located at our flagship campus in Aix-en-Provence, France, ACM-IAU’s Center for Wine and Gastronomy aims to provide students with a 360 degree perspective of the wine and food industry. From our pedagogical vineyard to our Wine Lab, students have opportunities to learn and apply biodynamic viticulture techniques to grow well-balanced grapes. Then transform those grapes into wine, eventually aging and bottling it, fostering a holistic understanding of the entire production process at every step.
ACM-IAU’s Center for Wine and Gastronomy also offers a number of courses on post-production activities as related to wine and food, to empower students for the challenges in this exciting and rewarding industry. Courses include: International Wine Business, Wine and Food Pairing, Wine Marketing and Sensory Analysis, The History and Culture of Wine, Food Culture of Provence… Field studies to engage with local producers and actors in the industry is central to our experiential approach.
Philosophy
“Terroir is as much about place as it is a philosophy.” Central to our approach at ACM-IAU’s Center for Wine and Gastronomy is to reveal the importance and impact of place on our wine and food. This includes the centrality of soils, climates, and biodiversity, as well as the people and local communities that produce and help contribute to the uniqueness of each product. It is the core motivation why we choose to farm our vineyard biodynamically, which is underscored by the notion of terroir as a philosophical approach. The quest to discover, understand, and apply an ensemble of techniques that bring the product and producer, and by extension the consumer, closer to the land.
Learning Opportunities
With its own winery and vineyard of 300 plants, ACM-IAU’s Center for Wine and Gastronomy offers plenty of opportunities to learn. From planting to corking, every step of the process is done by hand. With no less than three varietals and an equal number of pruning techniques, there is no lack of diversity in the vineyard. In the winery, the same can be said about our aging containers… we count clay, stainless steel, French oak barrels, and resin among the options to hold our precious liquids.
Viticulture
Viticulture refers to every single step of the process from planting juvenile vines to harvesting the grapes. Each of these processes need to be handled with care with wine’s unique place in the beverage world – in that it can only be made one time per year. However, any ‘mistake’ is usually viewed as a learning opportunity, one which can be turned around towards next year’s work.
Planting
Planting new vines is where it all starts! Occasionally a rootstock will fail, a trunk will snap, or an act of god will kill a vine, necessitating the planting of a new one. These are lovingly referred to as the “babies” of the vineyard and need a bit of extra care. With our small size, we can handle the strain of planting and caring for new vines almost yearly, which is an unparalleled experience for any aspiring viticulteur.
Pruning
Pruning is the most important action in the vineyard. Done in the winter, this action is preparing the vine for the entire next year of the growing cycle. Frankly, this is dramatic to the vine, as we are removing 90% of the previous year’s growth. But, each cut is made intentionally, with the mindset of shaping the plant to grow shoots and clusters exactly where we would like them to be, for the years and even decades to come.
Harvesting
Harvesting is the classic visual appeal of a vineyard, and the beginning of winemaking! Ripe, full, bursting with sugary juice. Clusters of berries hang temptingly from the vines, just begging for a vigneron to harvest them. Little is seen of the work behind those little fruits, who are afforded every care along their road to maturity. 2023 saw ACM-IAU’s Les Saules vineyard’s first harvest, done in a single day. On our third year running, we had to split the work into four!
Enology
An extensive process with a whole bunch of steps, winemaking sounds romantic, and often is… though as you will be quick to learn, it still involves hard work. As soon as grapes are harvested, they must be crushed and de-stemmed, either going direct to press or staying on the stems and skins to macerate. Once the fever-dream days of fermentation are over, we crush the grapes, extract the last of the juices, then set the wines to settle, and age. Next to last are the blending and fining trails, in which we determine how best to mix our different varieties… and then bottling and corking!
Crushing/De-Stemming/Pressing
Crushing and De-Stemming are processes that happen almost immediately after harvest. This can vary due to winemaking techniques: rosé, white, orange, and red wines all having slightly different processes and approaches to this situation. A specialized crusher-de-stemmer machine detaches berries from each cluster, crushing them to release the juice, and removing the stems. However, a winemaker can decide to play with how many grapes are crushed and/or de-stemmed. This means, we can put full berries, stems, or even entire clusters into the wine… which will add a whole different array of new aromas and tastes.
Fermentation Management
Fermentation management includes chemical monitoring: levels of sugar, ethanol, pH, tartaric acids, malic acids, lactic acids, amino acids, etc. As winemakers, we are attempting to create the proper environment for the yeasts, important microorganisms which will consume nitrogen and sugar to create ethanol. Proper aeration control includes techniques such as punch downs (physically pushing down the skins, seeds, and stems to cover them in liquid) and pour overs (removing liquid from the bottom and pouring it over the cap) – the conversation between oxygen and wine being one of the most sensitive controls in the winery.
Blending/Fining Trials
Blending is an important step in winemaking. We have three varietals within our vineyard, and even contract to harvest grapes from off-site vignerons. Each of these goes through fermentation alone, which allows us to hold trials in which students taste each grape’s wine, determining which flavors would be most complementary. In our philosophy, this occurs in the fall, so that the blended wines have the time to age and grow together. Though we believe in wine made with the least amount of intervention possible, similar trials happen in the spring, when students are given the learning opportunity of bench trials with organic fining agents.
