AUTHENTICITY

Hand-crafted, custom-made barrels for great wines.

Vincent Darnajou has inherited a thousand-year-old tradition, which he has made into his trademark.  He is a craftsman at heart and in spirit and seeks to express his savoir-faire in achieving the highest premium quality barrels every day in the cooperage without ever resorting to industrial processes. “We adapt so that all the care and attention given to our respective materials is revealed by the vinification and the charring. The ageing process brings together our two passions which merge to become one”.

This is a philosophy of life and way of working which Vincent Darnajou nurtures through organising direct contacts and exchanges of views with his clients in meetings and tastings, developing a relationship of close almost implicit trust. It is only through this complicity, backed up by his professional expertise, that Vincent Darnajou is able to respond and adjust to the demands of a hand-crafted, custom-made approach. Over time, the Darnajou cooperage’s reputation for hand-crafted skill has increased, thanks to “word of mouth” -the supreme and impartial accolade of the quality of the cooper’s work.

“Darnajou barrels surge ahead while maintaining a classical style”, it is said among clients. 

THE ART OF A TRADITIONAL CRAFT

The true cornerstone of our company are the men and women who form it.

“Only teamwork can bring results and enable us to attain high levels of excellence”, Vincent Darnajou. 
To help him maintain this genuinely artisanal, personalised and profoundly humanistic approach to coopering, Vincent Darnajou has built a team of 15. As in the team-sports he is so fond of and from which he has drawn some of his values, his work cannot be done successfully all alone.

“It’s essential for the company to encourage its staff to share their knowledge and skills and to motivate them to be committed and collaborative in their work”.
An ambitious human resources plan to enhance the value of the individual members of the team enables each cooper to apply his own knowledge, talent, skills and personality in the crafting of his barrel from start to finish. He then signs it with his initials engraved on the barrel, as would a master-goldsmith, proud of his work. 
Enthusiasts of great wines (as well as angels that take their famous share from the barrels of these precious growths) doubtless taste a little of the soul of the cooper, transmitted while crafting his barrel, very probably at the moment of charring, which is the last touch brought to the cooper’s work of art.