Hello, I’m Joanne

I’m from Liverpool and I arrived in Southwest France via Paris and the Perche in Lower Normandy. My husband and I set up home in Espinas in 2018, a little village between Cahors, Montauban, Toulouse and Albi..and it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the local wines - organic, biodynamic and natural wines made from rare and ancient native grape varieties by a passionate new generation of producers.

They sent me on a trip, a sort of Southwest wine version of the Arabian nights where one story leads to another — another grape variety, terroir or grower, another way of seeing and doing.

I visited the vineyards, went to salons, read voraciously and enrolled on wine courses -and then, in 2023, I opened a wine shop in a converted stable beneath our house and started hosting tastings, because there’s so much to discover on our doorstep.

*Joanne holds the WSET 3 in Wines and Franck Thomas Certificate in Intuitive & Geo-sensorial tasting.