IN THEIR COMPANY
How we met
I first met Alvina in the summer of 2010, at La Ferme d’Augustin near Ramatuelle, where Camille and I were working the season as interns. We were classmates at the time, eighteen and nineteen, not yet a couple. Alvina, who has been Camille’s closest friend since school, came down for a few days to visit. We were all very young, drinking far more rosé than serious wine, and having more fun than any of us deserved. Camille’s family were rooted in Puligny-Montrachet, and Alvina and Philippe were already settled in Burgundy. The four of us became close over the following years, first while Alvina and Philippe were running a small brasserie in Beaune, then through Philippe’s wine merchant work and Alvina’s return to her studies. Wine entered our lives gradually and from different directions. Early on, Camille and Alvina found their sweet spot in the steely Sauvignon Blancs of Sancerre, the precision and minerality they would later prize in the wines Alvina herself now makes. Philippe and I gravitated to the Northern Rhône, with a shared love of singular winemakers like Reynaud and Soldera, and to long evenings of Chartreuse after dinner once the more sensible halves of the table had gone to bed.
Their first vintage was 2018, and the following summer they took us into the cellar beneath their house in Puligny. The ceiling was so low that Philippe, the tallest of us, was almost bending to reach the back rows of barrels. There were fifteen or twenty in total, neatly arranged along the gravel floor. Several still bore the discreet logo of Domaine Henri Boillot, kindly passed on as used barrels by Guillaume Boillot to spare a young domaine an entirely new-oak first vintage. Alvina and Philippe walked us through every cuvée. There were some nerves, the way there always are when close friends are about to taste a year of your life from barrel, but mostly there was pride and a real eagerness to hear what we thought. We tasted the lot, La Rue aux Vaches included.
Eight cuvées, six thousand bottles, and the start of everything.
Plenty of milestones since. Alvina was a bridesmaid at our wedding at the Clos Vougeot in 2022, and that night we served our two hundred guests magnums of the 2018 La Rue aux Vaches that Alvina and Philippe had given us as a wedding gift, with a special label made for the occasion. The wines have grown alongside the friendship.
Across all those years, Alvina and Philippe have been the friends who always make the drive to wherever we are: the Northern Rhône, the south of France, Lyon, London. At the winery, though, Alvina is more reserved, leaving the presenting to Philippe and often slipping in towards the end of a tasting, more comfortable letting him hold the floor. Where she is steady and quiet, he is the louder enthusiasm of the household. Whenever Philippe heads anywhere for more than a day, on holiday or a long visit, his car boot is rarely without a generous selection of bottles for whomever he is going to see.
What they most often open when the dinner calls for a red rather than a white tells you something: a Côte-Rôtie from Gérin, a mature Las Cases, a Barolo from Burlotto. Rarely a Côte de Nuits. There is an old French football joke between rival supporters of Lyon and Marseille, il n’y a qu’un seul Olympique, there is only one Olympique, and I suspect that, glass in hand and smile in place, Alvina and Philippe might jokingly say the same of the Côte: that there is only one, the Côte de Beaune.
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