The Taste Of Place. French Vineyard Life With Caro Feely

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water.” Galileo Galilei

So much of the joy of travel is eating and drinking and I certainly love to try local wines when I visit new places!

In this interview, Caro Feely talks about why she and her husband gave up successful careers to take on a rundown vineyard in a new country, the struggles they went through to build up the business — even down to their blood shed on the land itself. There are a surprising number of ways to die in a vineyard! We also talk about the importance of terroir — the unique taste of a place due to environmental factors — and the different wines they produce at Chateau Feely.

Caro Feely is a certified wine educator writing part-time from the organic biodynamic vineyard and wine school in Saussignac, France that she owns and runs with her husband, Sean. Part Irish, part South African, and now part French, she is passionate about wine and life. Her books include memoir About the Vineyard Life, and a nonfiction book, Wine: The Essential Guide to Tasting History, Culture, and More.

Show notes

• Giving up the corporate life for a tumbledown French vineyard
• The challenges of starting a vineyard
• The surprising ways to die amongst the vines
• Terroir and the importance of the land
• The different wines of Chateau Feely
• Recommended books about vineyards

You can find Caro Feely at ChateauFeely.com

Transcript of the interview

Joanna: Caro Feely is a certified wine educator writing part-time from the organic biodynamic vineyard and wine school in Saussignac, France that she owns and runs with her husband, Sean. Part Irish, part South African, and now part French, she is passionate about wine and life. Her books include memoir About the Vineyard Life, and a nonfiction book, Wine: The Essential Guide to Tasting History, Culture, and More.

Welcome, Caro.

Caro: Thank you, Jo. It’s a pleasure to talk to you today.

Joanna: I’m so excited. As I said before recording, I wish I was there in your vineyard, and we were talking over a glass of wine.

Caro: For sure. That would be good.

Joanna: That would definitely be my favorite way of doing this. But we’re on Skype, so, for now, we’ll just get into it.

You and I share a background in business consulting, which is so interesting. I was also at Accenture and briefly IBM.

Tell me, why did you give up the corporate life for a French vineyard?

Caro: It’s quite a story. I guess it goes back pretty far. Sean and I met in Johannesburg back in 1993, and we pretty quickly said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go wine farming?’ He had grandparents that were vine growers in Stellenbosch in South Africa near Cape Town.

Vineyard of Chateau Feely. Photo used with permission from Caro Feely

I had shared a house with a guy that was a master of wine, so we both had this passion for wine. We were both in completely different careers at the time. Sean was a journalist, and I was an economist, but just starting work for IBM as a consultant.

We started to cook up this idea of going wine farming, following our passion, and we moved to Cape Town, and it was kind of a long shot. It was clear that we had to pay off our student loans before we had any chance of going wine farming. But work actually then took us to Dublin, and we both have Irish roots.

We visited France on a wine holiday, and we totally fell in love. And that was the start of, ‘Maybe, we’ll go to France to follow our vineyard dream and not back to South Africa.’

And, of course, at that stage, we were both still in other careers, Sean in finance and me still in consulting. But we had this dream, this idea that we wanted to pursue, and we kept our heads down, saved every penny that we had, and slowly moved towards our goal.

It was dream about it first, start think about, ‘Well, what can we do? We can’t do it right now, but what can we do to kind of prepare ourselves for this?’ And that was things like, you know, learning French, visiting France for research purposes to taste wine of course, and slowly bringing it together.

We were preparing ourselves doing things like learning French, learning about wine, visiting France to learn more about it, and slowly moving ourselves closer to the goal of moving to France and following this dream. Bu...