Harvest ended on September 24th after two full weeks at the Domaine Filliatreau.

The quality is excellent, good sugar levels and balanced acidity  but we did have a dry summer so not a lot of juice. As a comparison, the average is 35hl/ha instead of 57hl/ha in 2020 vintage. 

The berries are medium sized but pure. We should have a very nice vintage. Here are some photos.

Our 2025 harvest was very good, both in Marsala and Pantelleria.

The weather conditions in 2025 were perfect, with a good amount of rain at the right times and the right amount of heat needed for the Grillo and Zibibbo grapes.

Everything went well during the harvest; the grapes were healthy and of excellent quality.

I'm sending a photo of the Zibibbo grapes from Pantelleria drying in the sun for the production of our Bukkuram. A truly exceptional vintage, dedicated to our beloved Sebio.

Early, fast, intense and challenging. These are the words that come to mind when we reflect on the 2025 harvest. We started picking grapes in the second week of September and finished on 15th of October. Overall, we are very happy with the results, which will include the GG’s and a bit of noble sweet Auslese.

The vintage began with a warm and dry spring, with only a few vineyards affected by late frost. The weather was good during flowering. Sufficient rainfall in the summer provided ideal conditions for our Riesling grapes. Some rainy days and warm temperatures during the first week of September forced us to start picking earlier than expected. Thanks to our diligent team, we managed to bring the grapes into the cellar right on time. 

Here are some pictures.

2025 was a good vintage, with a total of 940 mm of rainfall between January 2025 and October 2025. The winter was cold but unfortunately snowless, and bud break began in late March among the lower vineyards and in mid-April among the higher vineyards. Abundant rainfall in winter and spring helped us to face this beautiful vintage.

In late spring and summer the weather helped us, with some rain and moderate temperatures in June and July, allowing the grapes to fully mature in early September. By September, on northern Etna, we had average temperatures of 10 degrees Celsius at night and 20-25 degrees Celsius during the day, which allowed for slow and balanced ripening.

The harvest began on September 16th with the picking of the white grapes from the lower vineyards for our Versante Nord Bianco. The harvest concluded on October 20th in our highest vineyard, Quota N. We can be satisfied with this year's production. We will have lighter, lower-alcohol reds thanks this year, while for the Versante Nord Bianco, we will have a higher percentage of Carricante,around 80%. We believe this will contribute more acidic structure to the wine, providing a clearer representation of the Carricante from the northern part of Etna compared to the eastern side.

Here are some pictures of the 2025 harvest!

2025: heatwaves and hail.

2025 started well enough, with a spring that balanced rain and sun, leading the vines to a healthy, slightly advanced cycle with flowering in early June, leading us to believe we’d harvest somewhere around mid-September. Around June 15th, temperatures starting steadily rising to over 85 degrees. At this point, the vines soaked up the sun to develop its vegetal cycle. After a severe hail storm in July that damaged two of our hectares, another heatwave scorched the vines for the last two weeks of August.

The grapes began to suffer, as the vines began absorbing their juices to resist and therefore lowering what we’d initially planned to harvest. In Sancerre, the first team of pickers arrived in late August to make sure that alcoholic potentials wouldn’t sky-rocket. We began on September 2nd: we are far from the yields we would hope for, there was hardly any juice in the grapes so this is yet another vintage with really low yields. The one positive is the balance of the juices, with potentials ranging between 13 and 14% and good acidities.

While this has always been the case, we are now dependent on climactical conditions that continue to become even more extreme. 2025 was the most precocious vintage since 1976, narrowly beating out 2003 and 2009 by a couple of days.

The 2025 vintage was characterized by abundant rainfall during late spring and a predominance of the Mistral, a cool, dry wind blowing from the northwest.
This allowed the vines to achieve good yields and delay the ripening of the grapes.

Zibibbo, a grape known for its thick skin, produced very large bunches this year with large berries, shifting the skin/pulp balance in favor of the pulp. Macerations were therefore shorter and the musts, lower in sugar than usual, were characterized by excellent acidity and freshness.

The wines have a low alcohol content, resulting in immediate and exceptionally drinkable wines from the start. Thanks to their volcanic flavor, the persistence on the palate never wanes. It is a rare vintage, and one that leaves us pleasantly surprised, especially since, in recent harvests, we have been accustomed to warm Sirocco winds and extreme temperatures.

In the plots where ripening occurs early, namely those near the sea, we harvested almost late, picking healthy, very ripe grapes that we dried to produce Passulata. This wine hadn't been made since 2021 because the grapes were never up to par.
It's been 10 years since we started, a very short time for someone in this profession. We still have a lot to learn, yet today I feel I know every plant on our 3 hectares better, I can sense how the wine from each plot will evolve, whether it will tend to reduce or oxidize, whether it should be separated from its lees sooner or later, and I'm more aware of the potential of our wines despite the variability
of the vintage.

I think that, just as pruning a vine requires metaphorically entering the plant itself, understanding the terroir and interpreting it requires living it every day, even though this requires enormous sacrifices because I live on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, far from the rest of the world.

Our 2025 harvest lasted from September 1st to September 12th with a few days of break in the middle The grapes were healthy with moderate-to-low yields but ultimately better than our tiny 2024 harvest.

The first wines seem tannic and well structured. I believe it will be quality vintage.

Sylvie,

After 2024, we thought we'd lived through the hardest vintage imaginable. And yet...

Winter was clement, with enough rain and a few more really cold days compared to past years. Spring is where we started facing problems, notably rain. The buds grew at a relatively normal pace; pockets of mildew had already started appearing by late-April/early-May on the most sensitive parcels, but at this point things didn't seem particularly dramatic. Everything felt quite manageable up until early June. 

From the 2nd to 8th of June, there was between 100 and 120mm of rain, making it impossible to properly protect the vines at a crucial moment. We began our conversion to organics in 2024, where only copper and sulfur are allowed as contact treatments; it is estimated these are efficient up to 20mm of rain but no more. As each week passed, the rain was too constant for us to do anything. By late June, the vines were severely marked with mildew. And what followed was a three week heatwave and drought for the rest of the month that continued up until harvest. 

Despite all the previous rain, by mid-August the high heat triggered hydric stress and blocked the grapes' physiological maturity at a time where phenolic ripeness was already quite advanced (the pips were ripe but the grapes were aromatically lacking. After waiting a few weeks hoping to obtain optimal aromatic richness, I decided to start harvesting early, on August 23rd. This decision was to avoid what I perceived as a degradation of the grapes' acid. It was the right decision, because we'd already lost 60% of the crop and that accelerated the maturities of what was left on the vines. 

We wrapped up on September 2nd. In the end it was the right choice to pick so early, because the heavy rains that followed in early September could have destroyed the PH levels. In the end, the juices were qualitative, balanced, aromatic and with the right amount of acidity. The alcoholic fermentation was longer than in 2024, with malolactic following and now all but done (November 17th). The wines are very promising and it's also the first year we're incorporating some new vinification vessels including two new foudres.

2025: a great harvest.

The whole year was very nice: great weather, dry wind, no mildew at all. It was the opposite of 2024! It could have been an truly exceptional vintage, but the rain arrived just before and also during the harvest. Therefore, some bad acetic rot has developed itself, forcing us to throw away about 15 % of the grapes.

Anyway, I am very happy with this vintage, because the quality and the yields are good. Furthermore, it was possible to produce all the types of Vouvray: dry, semi-dry, sweet and also sparkling. It is pretty rare to have this possibility.

This year was very dry in Vouvray, but my vineyard did not suffer from the drought, because it is located in a cool climate valley and also -especially- because I plow the soil of all my estate. Plowing is very helpful for the humidity during a dry season.

The 2025's harvest was very early, from September the 8th to the 26th. That is one month earlier than 2024!

2025 was excellent in terms of quality but a bit disappointing in quantity. The vinifications were smooth but it will be a very solar vintage lacking Beaujolais typicity. I believe it will be very similar to 2015, then years later!

The other big news is that the "next vigneron of La Roilette" was born, our grandson Léo!