La Maîtresse

Hard-working and complementary are the adjectives used to describe the brothers Cina, Manfred and Damian. Both studied viticulture and oenology, but above all learned the trade. From a very young age with their parents Fernand & Rose-Marie, Saturdays were spent in the vineyard rather than on the football pitch with friends. Despite the hard work, Manfred and Damian saw the great development potential of their father's business early on and rightly envisioned a promising future.

The Cina brothers have been working in their business for more than 30 years, surrounded by a meticulous and enthusiastic team. Their motives? Always one step ahead, producing excellent wines, developing innovative grape varieties in Valais, being positive and, above all, close to the customer. The winery is known for its diverse range of specialties. They cultivate an exceptionally large number of grape varieties on 20 hectares of their own vineyards, which enables them to offer around 40 different wines.

In their work in the vineyard, they focus on natural and quality-oriented care of the vines. The work in the vines is the most important activity in the annual calendar and forms the basic building block for high-quality wine. From the vine to vinification and bottling, the two brothers cultivate the wine with great dedication. Wine production is far more than just a job for them, it is a passion and a pleasure for both of them to marvel at this phenomenon every year and to be a part of it.

It is up to the cellar master to compose a complex, finesse-rich but balanced taste experience from wines of different characters. Often, colourful, full-bodied and tannic wines are blended with lighter, fruit-intensive wines to achieve a more complex, intense harmony of aromas. The aim is not to conceal the weaknesses of a wine, but to combine strengths; the cuvée should be of higher quality and taste better than the single-varietal wine. In order for a cuvée to present itself as a harmonious composition, characteristics such as fruitiness, acidity, tannin content, alcohol content and residual sweetness have to be very precisely sensory assessed during preliminary tastings. It is an art that requires a great deal of knowledge, skill, sensitivity and experience to finely match complementary varieties to create a particularly round and harmonious wine.

The terms assemblage and cuvée sometimes cause more confusion than clarity. This is because they are used differently in French than in German. In German-speaking countries, the term cuvée and the synonym assemblage are used for a blend of different grape varieties, vintages or sites. Not so in France. Cuvée comes from the French Cuve (vat or wine container) and actually refers to a certain amount of wine in a vessel. Accordingly, in French, each separately bottled wine is called a cuvée - in the sense of bottling. The composition of the cuvée is called assemblage in France. If simple wines are blended, the French speak of a coupage.