When Marie and Vincent Tricot moved from Anjou to the village of Orcet in Auvergne in 2002, they were chasing something specific: pre-phylloxera vines. Auvergne, they had learned, harbored one of the largest concentrations of ungrafted old vines in all of France. What they built there, over two decades of farming and winemaking on volcanic soils at the foot of an extinct volcano, has become one of the most admired natural wine estates in the country.
Formed by Legends
Vincent trained at the Beaujolais School of Oenology in the 1990s, where he crossed paths with Marcel Lapierre, Jean-Francois Ganevat, and others who were pioneering a non-interventionist approach at a time when that term did not yet exist as a marketing category. Those encounters were formative. When he and Marie established their own domain, they brought that same ethos to Auvergne's old-vine Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, working without added sulfur, without dry yeasts, and without filtration from the very first vintage.
The Terroir of Orcet
The Tricots farm around 10 hectares on the volcanic Puy-de-Dome, where the soils are a blend of ancient lava flows, basalt, and clay. This geology gives the wines a distinctive mineral tension and freshness that sets Auvergne apart from Burgundy and Beaujolais, the regions with which it shares grape varieties. The vines are certified organic and have been farmed without synthetic inputs for decades. The estate holds organic certification dating back to 1972.
Mentors of a Region
Marie and Vincent Tricot are widely recognized as mentors to a generation of younger Auvergne winemakers. Their zero-sulfur approach, applied consistently across their entire range of village and single-parcel cuvees, set the benchmark for what was possible in this remote, mountainous appellation. These are wines of great purity, warmth, and precision, from one of France's most quietly influential natural wine estates.
