Henry Frédéric Roch founded Domaine Prieuré Roch in 1988. Mindful of the wine-making traditions and pedological singularity of the Burgundy terroir, he developed and enhanced the domaine by scrupulously applying the ancestral methods of tending the vines, the vinification , and cellering which have historically made the wines of Burgundy so glorious, methods known today as “organics” and “bio-dynamics”. Becoming co-director of Romanée Conti following the death of his brother Charles, he shares his viticultural vision and his passion of fine wines with Yannick Champ, whom he has nominated co-director of Domaine Prieuré Roch. In trying to establish balance in the vineyard, we try to imagine having a harmonious balance in the wine. Balance is something we look for, it is never obtained, but we try. And it was our intuition that, by adding sugar... or acid or things like that, inevitably we managed... we managed to adjust a few small elements, but overall it unbalanced everything, even more than what is natural. That was actually something... that made us confident, I mean aware, about the importance of what goes into the vat: perfect grapes... and little or nothing else. I liked a little bit of sugar... but used in the sense of chaptalization, in the noblest sense of the term. It finishes fermentation... and this by using natural yeasts, until their depletion. This allows for a good approach to still wines. That according to the chemist Chaptal. It was good strategy... But for different reasons we chose to abandon all additives, especially sulfur which is horrible. I can't stand its smell, it hurts me, it smells bad, it gives headaches. In the winery, sulfur is very unpleasant. For drinking wines if you don’t add any sulfur, or very very little, the wine is much more digestible and more pleasant. It is much better for your body. Wine is originally meant to give pleasure, not be a punishment. With this logic we stopped adding sulfur... that was in 1991 I think. Totaly stopped using it, in the vinification process... and the aging in casks. Very tiny amounts of sulfur during bottling. We have increasingly transformed our trials without sulfur since 1995. These have become more and more comprehensive. Absolutely no added sulfer at all, this means the wine we bottle... is 100% pure fruit. When it leaves the vat, into the barrels, when it leaves the barrel to be bottled... there are no additives, no meddling at all. There you go.