Château des Poupets

From the estate

Seasons at Château des Poupets

Wine on this hill is a calendar before it is a bottle — pruning frost, flowering, veraison, harvest, and the long hush of élevage.

Wine Travel Guides

Published 20 May 2026

Winter: the quiet architecture

Pruning shapes the year to come. The vines are bare, the cellar is cool, and wines from the last harvest settle in tank or barrel. Guests who visit in winter see the bones of the landscape — granite, chapel, and rows waiting for sap.

Spring: risk and green

Budburst is beautiful and nervous. Frost can take a night’s work. Shoots race, and the vineyard needs constant attention. By late spring the hill is green again and tasting appointments share the calendar with tractor hours.

Seasons at Château des Poupets
BBC Good Food

Summer: patience in the heat

Canopy management, disease watch, and water stress decide September. Veraison turns bunches from green to blue-black. Evenings smell of warm stone. This is when Juliénas builds the concentration that carbonic tricks alone cannot fake.

Autumn and after

Harvest is still largely by hand on these slopes. Then comes sorting, maceration, pressing, and the first taste of a vintage that will keep changing. Nouveau season lights up November; the Crus keep working quietly through winter. If you stay at the château, you are sleeping inside that cycle — not beside a postcard of it.

Every bottle of Juliénas from Les Poupets is a year you can drink. The journal simply writes down what the vines already know.

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