Continuation of our series on the great Aude families who write the history of the vine. Today that of the Panis at the Château du Vieux Parc in Conilhac and at the Château du Donjon in Bagnoles.
The history of the castles of Vieux-Parc and Donjon is written over six generations. At the end of the 19th century, Jean Malric exploited the land, then it was the turn of Joseph and his wife Marie-Louise Grimal, then their daughter Germaine, married to Pierre Mialhe. The line was secured by a Marie-Louise who married Guy Panis in 1951, with a tree estate in Saint-Laurentde la Salanque in her pocket. Louis ran the Old Park and the youngest of the brothers, Jean, the Donjon (the eldest Pierre, in charge of the Catalan estate, having died early).
Louis learned the winemaker’s trade on the job, “in contact with the workers”, he likes to say. For 10 years he taught sports in high schools in Brittany where he met his wife Claudie, a physical education teacher like him. In 1987 he returned to the country. The exploitation, of about thirty hectares at the time, already had a propensity for the marketing of its bottled wine, the fruit of the work of his father Guy at the German market. Many investments in the cellar, a development of land in AOC Corbières, a boom in the bottle occupied Claudie and Louis for more than 30 years before their son Guillaume and his partner Elodie settled down. After a viti-oeno BTS, the latter studied in Saint-Emilion, in Bordeaux, in Alsace and on the other side of the world, in Australia. Originally a tractor driver close to his father, Guillaume succeeded him in 2015. He added his stone to the building with the construction of a 400 m2 building to bring together on the same site the storage of bottles, the stainless steel vat and the pneumatic press . Thanks to a modernization of the cellar, aging in barrels, the château can now play in the big leagues of the Corbières appellation. The estate has grown to occupy today 63 hectares and a production of about 3,000 hectares, half of which is bottled.
Due to Covid and geopolitics, the numbers are now down. “We have lost the markets of China, Poland, Russia and Great Britain. Fortunately, sales to wine merchants in France compensate a little and our volumes in boxes are close to 200,000”, Guillaume points out. A dozen references are in the catalog with AOP Corbières and IGP Pays d’Hauterive and Pays d’OC. Red wines remain largely predominant and are showcased each year at the Wine Paris and ProWein trade shows in Germany.
The underground castle
The youngest of the family, Jean Panis, joined the fold in 1996 after a career in show business. An upgrade to the Lycée Charlemagne and his responsibilities at the head of the property led him to increase the area up to 80 hectares in production today with improving vines. There, it is AOP Minervois, AOP Cabardès and IGP Côteaux de Peyriac marketed at CHR and for export. Here too bottle sales have been affected by Covid and have gone from 400,000 to 200,000: «The cellars, as everywhere, are full and the future appears all the more difficult with the price increases we are forced to apply», worries Jean Panis .
