“If I stopped my old work and went to the vines, it wasn't to not work. It was really to work and do good things.”
Sébastien Congretel spent his twenties on North Sea oil platforms — one month on, one month off, the horizon nothing but gray water and steel. He had grown up between Congo, Cameroon, and Indonesia, trailing his father's expat postings, and the rigs were just another version of that life: temporary, rootless, well-paid.
Then he met Charlotte in Paris in 2010. Her family had been growing Gamay in Beaujolais for seventeen generations.
They married that December. Their first son arrived in May. By July they had moved to Régnié-Durette, deep in the granite hills of southern Beaujolais, where Charlotte's father still worked his vines. During his months off the rigs, Seb helped his father-in-law and fell under the influence of Julien Sunier, the local organic vigneron who became what he calls his "Master Yoda."
Charlotte and her father made their first wine together in 2014 from a small parcel in Morgon. Two years later, Seb quit the oil platforms for good. L'Epicurieux was officially founded in 2016. The first commercial bottling came in 2019.
“If I stopped my old work and went to the vines,”
The domaine is small — four and a half hectares of gobelet-trained vines averaging sixty years old, rooted in diorite and pink granite. Seb practices closed-tank whole-bunch carbonic maceration, adds zero sulfites, and holds Demeter certification. Between the parcels, vegetated "islands" — clusters of trees — act as windbreaks and biodiversity corridors, softening the boundary between vineyard and wild land.
The wine names betray his other life: Whole Lotta Love, Hey Joe, Gamayleon. His Paris friends nicknamed him "the Zebra," though the reason is lost to those who weren't there.
"If I stopped my old work and went to the vines," he says, "it wasn't to not work. It was really to work and do good things."
The granite soils of Régnié hold the day's heat well into the evening. The rigs are a long way from here.
WINES FROM L'EPICURIEUX
Red flowers, small berries, orange peel on a silky, stony frame. Semi-carbonic whole-bunch maceration, 16 days in concrete.
Shape-shifts with every sip — raspberry, white pepper, wet rocks. Light-bodied but electric with energy.
Fragrant but structured Morgon from pink granite soils. An intriguing complexity that rewards the second glass.
Biodynamic Brouilly with zero added sulfites. Whole-bunch, full-bodied for the appellation, and yes — it fills the room.