Domaine Mas des Étoiles

Hand sorting before the cellar

Hand sorting sets the pace before the cellar takes over. Arnaud Bladinières works as winemaker at Domaine Mas des Étoiles in Pescadoires, in the Cahors country of the Lot. His route into the estate runs through vineyard discipline first: training at Lycée Montagne LEGTA de Libourne - Montagne and LEGTA Agropolis, Montpellier, then work carried across Château Bladinières and Mas des Étoiles. The domaine itself began in 2007, when part of the Château Bladinières vineyard was separated to make a smaller house with its own method and its own visual language. The first vintage followed in 2008. Today Bladinières holds the reins at Mas des Étoiles, while also carrying responsibility at Château Bladinières in Pescadoires. That double station matters here because the wines are not conceived as cellar inventions alone. They begin in local knowledge of Cahors terraces, in the choice to keep the work close to the fruit, and in a portfolio built around Malbec with smaller white plantings. The estate’s signature includes petite étoile blanc, a quiet counterpoint to the darker Cahors register.

Old terraces, wild yeasts, new barriques

The vineyard covers 15.6 hectares, with 14 hectares planted to red varieties and 1.6 hectares to white varieties. Malbec and Merlot carry the red work under AOP Cahors and IGP Côtes du Lot; Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc supply the whites. Since 2019, the vineyard has been in conversion to organic agriculture, and the house describes its viticulture as raisonnée. The vines stand on old gravel, silice and clay terraces, with parcels of more than 35 years of age rooting into the Cahors soils. For Une Étoile est Née, the fruit comes from a 1.19-hectare parcel and the wine is 100% Malbec. Harvesting is by hand, followed by manual sorting, cold pre-fermentary maceration, and fermentation with indigenous yeasts. Alcoholic fermentation lasts 20 days. The wine then goes directly into new French oak barriques of 225 liters for malolactic fermentation, before 24 months of élevage in the same new oak. In the 2020 vintage, Une Étoile est Née reached 14.5% alcohol, with a house serving frame of 16°C to 18°C after 1 hour of decanting.

The cellar under the star vault

The place keeps a small estate tempo. In the cellar, the method favors sequence over display: fruit from the terraces, sorting, cold maceration, native fermentation, barrique, time. The tasting room and labels carry the astronomy thread that gives Mas des Étoiles its name, with celestial vault imagery set against wines whose center of gravity remains Cahors Malbec. That star language could have become decoration; here it functions more like a house mark, a way of holding together a compact domaine, a dark-fruited appellation, and a white cuvée that sits just off the main line. The setting is quiet, with the Lot valley close by and Pescadoires giving the work its village scale. The next glass to follow is not an abstraction but a named signature from Bladinières’s bench, petite étoile blanc.