Gérôme Pistre ~ Château de Brague
geromepistre.bsky.social
Gérôme Pistre ~ Château de Brague
@geromepistre.bsky.social
Trying to revive a centuries-old vineyard with tech & AI (among other things).
Drink Responsibly.

www.chateaudebrague.com
https://www.instagram.com/chateau_de_brague/
Pinned
It's hard to know for how long people have been making wine at the Château de Brague, but it's likely more than 3 centuries. It's one of my big project to better understand its history.
Small anti-chronological thread of what I know so far.
Even high end Bordeaux have to modernize and sometimes abandon the sacred "blend". And they still deliver in terms of labeling.
December 22, 2025 at 6:30 PM
What I'm working on:
- Setting up a better comms system than Whatsapp + telling whoever happens to be here. (Whatsapp is already an innovation from this year).
- Researching containers to test & develop new products.
December 19, 2025 at 3:51 PM
Had taken some nice shots during the harvest I'd forgotten about.
December 18, 2025 at 2:34 PM
It's almost impossible to extract meaningful information from any single document, but putting all of them together there's a glimpse of a story that appears.
December 15, 2025 at 5:50 PM
We can only improve what we can measure. (And we're getting computers pretty good at measuring stuff, but nothing beats manual fine tuning).
December 15, 2025 at 2:43 PM
The wine ecosystem is still probably without equal in Bordeaux. We have more than enough choice for mobility bottlers that come directly inside our cellar.
Cleaning.
December 8, 2025 at 6:01 PM
Bottling !
December 8, 2025 at 5:51 PM
I've managed to scan all 77 documents, for a total of 500 pages and gave them all to Gemini to get a title, summary, and full transcript for each. It's insane but it basically works.
December 7, 2025 at 5:06 PM
Scanning setup
December 4, 2025 at 9:24 AM
I've found hundreds of documents about the Château, dating back to ~1720 (so far before our family acquired it in 1936). And there's a lot of mysteries (I'll dig deeper into that later) about who built this estate, so I'm trying to do a bit of research. Problem, most of it look like this.
December 3, 2025 at 5:39 PM
I'm really interested in the vineyard's history with relation my family, but also at what happened before, as it's existed since long before my great-grandfather acquired it (1936). This is the oldest proof I have that there were already grapes growing more than 100 years ago.
December 2, 2025 at 1:28 PM
This is the actual bottling. We have one coming soon, I'll try to take some videos.

bsky.app/profile/gero...
December 2, 2025 at 10:13 AM
As a kid, we still had a "bottling" machine in the cellar, that would directly fill the bottles from the vats and close them - that was cool but too expensive to maintain, so we now use external services that come with theirs. But we still have the labeling machine, which is almost as satisying.
December 1, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Found this letter from my great-grandfather about one of his first visit to the Château in 1937. Lots of mundane things about maintaining a vineyard, but one thing caught my eye: the wine they were making was at 8-9 degrees! The same location was sometimes as high as 15º this year.
December 1, 2025 at 10:06 AM
Identifying rows was much more feasible from the orthophotos. This is the best measure of the total amount of vines I actually have, and I like the idea of knowing exactly where are all my rows. Almost 100% claude-vibe-coded this time

bsky.app/profile/gero...
So I hope to get several things out of the orthophoto. First, a proper measure of the vineyard and the plots. That's simple: just import the photo into qgis, draw the polygons by hand and I got a pretty good estimate.
December 1, 2025 at 6:32 AM
So I hope to get several things out of the orthophoto. First, a proper measure of the vineyard and the plots. That's simple: just import the photo into qgis, draw the polygons by hand and I got a pretty good estimate.
December 1, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Phytosanitary care feel like spraying liquid money, and we're not even organic. How can we use less? Let's try to vibe code a vineyard-mapping project for precision agriculture.
December 1, 2025 at 5:27 AM
It's hard to know for how long people have been making wine at the Château de Brague, but it's likely more than 3 centuries. It's one of my big project to better understand its history.
Small anti-chronological thread of what I know so far.
November 30, 2025 at 5:25 PM