Wollersheim Winery - Prairie du Sac, WI Pt. 3

Philippe Coquard explains how the wine Domaine Reserve is among the rare “single field wines,” using only grapes from their oldest vines located on their steepest slopes since 1976.
Gold – 2016 Great Lakes Great Wine Competition, Farmington Hills, MI
Best of Class – 2011 Wisconsin State Fair Professional Wine Competition, Milwaukee, WI
Welcome to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast, I'm your host Forrest Kelly. From the seed to the glass, wine has past. Our aim at The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, the grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure. Our featured winery is as we continue our conversation with Philippe Coquard of Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin. Looking at your website, I see you've got a wine called Domaine Reserve. If we're going by just price. This is the most expensive wine you have. However, there's a reason for that. Explain that to me a little bit. Domain Reserve is made out of 100 percent Marshall for a French American hybrid. The vines are 48 years old. It is on our steeper slope. It's picked last. It's made as traditionally as it gets. It is age wine, you and Custom-made Barrel of Wisconsin, oak and French oak. We were the first winery in the nation to request 50 50, exactly the same number of Stav of French Oak and Wisconsin Oak. We've been doing that for 25 years. And that wine is you can put down that wine next to a cow going call a coolness. It's it has its own. Talulah It is one field. Nobody else in the world is making a wine like this Domain Reserve. And that to me is is the pride and the difference. It doesn't have to be Cab from Bordeaux or from California. It's we can do it here as well. Well, being the owner and the winemaker and having your experience that you've got, you can basically do everything at the entire winery. However, what is your favorite part? Oh, man. Oh, I love to. Well, I'm going to do I'm going to make myself a teacher someday. All I want to do is grow grapes. I want to do is make wine because you know, the business side of it. You know, the air travel side to finance or. Yeah, it's all part of business. But man, I'd rather be next to a barrel and taste a wine out of the barrel with my daughter. One of my passion is to pass the same passion to my daughter, Céline who will be the next winemaker after me. My she is thirty three. Thirty two, thirty three years old. She is our war in enologist and she is in my footsteps tasting wine with me. So I love tasting wine. I love to be in the vineyard. I am a grape farmer winemaker. So she got a little higher degree than you. I see she's a master of wine science from Cornell. Absolutely. And I so welcome it. I got everybody. She is a lot smarter than me so she can run the lab. She talks sexy like you though? No, I'm the only one stuck with a French accent. Gotcha. OK, OK. I'd like to ask this question. What is it that you would consider a big obstacle that you had to overcome to be successful? Being in Wisconsin, being in Wisconsin? Because you have to you always have to defend and prove the point. And just a quick story. And you I'm sure you will love that my father in law and I used to go to tasting Milwaukee and Chicago and so on trade show, and we would say, oh, would you like to taste a Wisconsin white, people would literally pull the glass out of the way and oh, no, no, it's all sweet. It's all fruit wine. I'm not interested. I knew the wine was the future of the winery. I knew that wine was the winner and one of the best wine around. And so you get hurt, you get slapped in the face. And then so we totally changed our approach. And for about five years, we never even said Wisconsin wine or would you like to taste this wine? Wow, it's so good. We're good friends. Then slowly we were able to educate the people that they are all the regions that can make wine, not only France and Italy and California, and that as being an obstacle that we have been able to. Chaumont and now the new generation, 30, something to twenty five something are interested and gone to the winery asking for the estate grown wine. They're not interested in Chardonnay and cabernet. They know it is not grown even in Wisconsin. So they are asking for the estate grown. Demolisher forced to market the Seyval Blanc percent. Pepijn and we have six or seven instead growing wine with among other wine that we buy grape for. In our last episode, part four of our interview with Philip of Wollersheim Winery in Wisconsin, we talk about the distillery and the bistro and just how big is Wollersheim Winery. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelley. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM if you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.