After eighteen to twenty-six months of barrel ageing, our wine then spends the rest of its life in bottle. It will experience the hazards and fatigue of travelling before finding tranquillity in the corner of somebody's cellar and finishing its life in the hands -or rather on the taste buds, of a discerning wine enthusiast. Many years will have passed; ten, twenty, thirty, sometimes many more -it has no fear of time. The conditions in which the wine is bottled, however, are of vital importance; the first decision being a judicious choice of date.

At the end of the barrel ageing process, the wine has matured. While its aromas have lost a little of their freshness they have gained in complexity, its tannins have become rounder and more tender, it has acquired something which suggests it is ripe and ready, something that only those who have been close to it can discern. Once this delicate balance has been reached, it becomes fragile and, if due care is not taken, it can be damaged like the ripe fruit from which it was born. It is then, and only then, that the bottling should be carried out, regardless of anything else which may seem of greater importance at the time. Scarcely forty years ago -though it seems to us more like a century ! - wine was bottled barrel by barrel.

The whole bottling operation often lasted several months, during which time the wine continued to develop, with the result that the wine bottled last could be quite different from the wine bottled at the beginning. Today, with equipment which is more and more efficient, the bottling only lasts two or three weeks and only takes place after the barrels have been racked into vat to make an overall blend, thus making sure that the first and last bottles are strictly identical. Furthermore, packaging material, such as bottles, corks, capsules and labels, as well as standards of cleanliness in relation to the wine, whether physical or microbiological, are subjected to extremely rigorous checks. This new technology is used with the sole aim of protecting the wine, not modifying it. Behind all these hygiene precautions and safety and traceability measures, the soul of the wine continues to shine through.