Le Temps des Rêveurs
Le Temps des Rêveurs is located in Pourrières, a tiny commune east of Aix-en-Provence at the foot of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the limestone ridge that Cézanne painted repeatedly throughout his lifetime. Jérôme Maillot grew up here in a family of grape growers. His grandfathers planted Carignan Noir and Ugni Blanc, his father later added Grenache, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon, and the grapes went to the local cooperative.
Jérôme left Provence to study agricultural engineering in Toulouse and then spent roughly twelve years working for other producers in the Rhône and the Costières de Nîmes, eventually running the vineyards and cellar for a large conventional producer before turning toward organic and natural wine. When he returned home in 2014, he came back to vineyards he had known since childhood, but with years of experience making wine elsewhere and his own ideas about what they could become. He took over the family vineyards in 2015 and made his first wine the following year, choosing to make and bottle wine himself rather than send all the grapes to the cooperative. He was teased for leaving a secure career to do it, and the joke became the name of the domaine: Le Temps des Rêveurs—“The Time of Dreamers.”
Today he farms roughly seven hectares around Pourrières. The vineyards sit in the upper Arc Valley, with Sainte-Victoire rising above them and strong winds helping keep the vines dry through the growing season. They are certified organic and worked with biodynamic methods, with cover crops between the rows and fruit trees planted among and around the vines. A draft horse does some of the cultivation, and everything is harvested by hand. Working outside the appellation, as Vin de France, is a choice: it lets him plant trees among the vines, which would otherwise cost him appellation status, and make a white from Grenache Noir.
Some of these vines are much older than Le Temps des Rêveurs itself. His grandfathers' Carignan Noir, planted in 1960 and 1968, and Ugni Blanc from 1965 are still producing. His father's Grenache, Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon remain too. Jérôme has added his own generation to the vineyard, but rather than simply pulling out old vines and starting again, he often works with the roots already there. Mourvèdre and Cinsault came in through field grafting, and some of his father's Cabernet Sauvignon has been grafted over to Carignan Blanc, itself a rarity. In 2024 he added Carignan Gris, rarer still, with only about 1.4 hectares of it in all of France.
That same willingness to work with what he has carries into the cellar. Depending on the grape and parcel, he uses direct pressing, whole clusters, semi-carbonic fermentation and short infusions. He works with fiberglass tanks as well as terracotta amphorae, using the amphorae for both fermentation and aging. Fermentations are spontaneous, and the wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered, with only small additions of sulfur.
The wines bring all those different pieces of the vineyard together. The 1960 Carignan planted by his family is bottled on its own as À Nos Étoiles. His father's Cabernet Sauvignon forms the backbone of the light, fresh Pendant que les Champs Brûlent. In Sirène, his own grafts of Mourvèdre and Cinsault join Grenache and a little of his father's Cabernet in a light red Jérôme describes as close to a clairet. His grafts of Carignan Blanc and Gris go into Into the White, where Grenache Noir—one of the grapes most closely associated with Provençal rosé—is pressed to make a white wine.
Rosé accounts for nearly nine out of every ten bottles of wine made in Provence, but Jérôme's wines show another side of the region. What he inherited became the foundation for what he wanted to make. His grandfathers' vines are still here, his father's choices are still here, and his own ideas now grow alongside them. Three generations of plantings, all of them finding their way into the glass.
