A core expression of the highest, sun-exposed vineyards, Soula is built for Mediterranean intensity. In 2022, it shows deeper red and dark fruit layers, salty mineral streaks, and a wilder spice edge, with more presence and grip than El Angel. It carries the heat of the slopes and the schist’s complexity without ever feeling heavy — structured but agile, broad-shouldered yet energized.
Domaine de Pechpeyrou
There’s a life pivot at the center of Bertrand de Guitaut’s story.
After decades in Madagascar, where his family ran an avocado farm, Bertrand returned to France roughly twenty-five years ago and settled in Banyuls-sur-Mer. What began as circumstance became obsession. He fell in with the natural wine community, helped found the now-iconic Les 9 Caves, and quietly set about carving his own place into the cliffs above the Mediterranean.
Bertrand is soft-spoken, almost reserved — until you see him in his vineyards. At over sixty, he moves up the vertiginous terraces faster than men half his age. His parcels are not gentle farmland; they are carved into rock. Soula, the steepest of them, takes its name from the sun-drenched face of a hill — the side that receives the most light. That exposure defines his wines: ripe, sun-soaked, unapologetically Mediterranean.
El Angel sits high on a mesa overlooking both Banyuls and the sea. The cellar below his home is barely 300 square feet — true vin de garage. A few stainless tanks, a handful of old barrels. Some vintages total just 750 bottles, thanks in part to the wild boar that roam the mountains and feast on his grapes before harvest.
Before export, Bertrand would load cases into his car and drive across France — Loire, Normandy — selling bottles out of his trunk. Production today hovers around 3,000 bottles in a good year. Financially, it’s modest. Philosophically, it’s everything.
His wines are rustic, alive, sometimes marked by a little Brett — not polished, not corrected, not chasing approval. They taste like heat, stone, and stubborn effort. They taste like Banyuls.
This is not a vanity project. It’s a second life built on steep ground — driven not by necessity, but by conviction.
