Domaine Wannaz

Preparations before the vine

Herbal infusions and biodynamic preparations come before the cellar work for Gilles Wannaz, winemaker at Domaine Wannaz in Chenaux. At La Tour de Chenaux, above Lake Geneva in Lavaux, he works as vigneron-œnologue, and since 2003 his role has also carried other forms of making: poète, metteur en scène culinaire, and créateur de produits issus de la vigne. The titles matter because the domaine does not treat the vine as a single raw material. It treats it as a source for wine, food, presentation, memory, and the gesture of gathering people around a table.

Wannaz converted the estate to biodynamic viticulture in 2002, the same year the present domaine took shape on the site associated with the medieval Tour de Chenaux. The old tower site, dating to the 12th century, gives the work a fixed point. Around it, the vineyard is kept as a living system rather than a production line: roots, stones, insects, plants, water, and human hands all stay in the frame. The lineage here is less a named apprenticeship than a discipline of place, carried through Lavaux terraces, ancestral practice, and the daily work of a team drawn from Switzerland and well beyond it.

A wide palette on Lavaux terraces

The vineyard program is biodynamic, small in scale, and tied to Lavaux AOC. Chasselas sits at the center of the regional language, but Domaine Wannaz works with a broader bench of varieties: sauvignon blanc, muscat, pinot blanc, pinot gris, pinot noir, syrah, gamay, Plant Robert, merlot, mondeuse, niellucciu, sylvaner, gamaret, diolinoir, and viognier. That range gives the cellar both white and red material, from the quieter clarity of Chasselas to the darker structure of syrah and mondeuse.

The method begins outside. The estate favors biodiversity, companion plants, insect habitats, herbal preparations, and homeopathic treatments for vine and soil, with synthetic inputs left out of the work. Lake Geneva moderates the slopes, softening temperature changes and frost pressure, while the terraced vineyard catches light in layers.

The cellar under La Tour de Chenaux

The room at Domaine Wannaz is quiet by nature of the work. Outside, the vineyard rises and steps above the lake; inside, the cellar belongs to the rhythm of fruit arriving, fermentations beginning, and decisions held close to the material. The setting is rustic rather than polished, with the preserved tower site nearby and the terraces doing much of the speaking. Lavaux gives the domaine its contour before a glass is filled.

The team around Wannaz is described by the estate as arc-en-ciel, a rainbow group of permanent and intermittent workers from Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Eritrea, Spain, the United States, Ethiopia, France, Italy, Lebanon, Macedonia, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland. That breadth changes the feel of the place. The cellar and vineyard remain local in soil and appellation, but the hands moving through them make the house communal, alert, and porous to the world.

Why the site holds

Domaine Wannaz has biodynamic vines in a UNESCO-listed landscape, worked around a 12th-century memory point in Lavaux. The estate’s next releases are best understood through that fixed material, not through novelty. Chasselas, Plant Robert, syrah, and the terraces of La Tour de Chenaux give the coming bottles their grammar.