While working in the late 1990s for a co-op in the French Catalonian Roussillon region, Philippe Gayral visited many small family estates, uncovering the best fortified wines and grapes that populate Roussillon in the foothills of the Pyrénées. Perhaps his greatest discovery was the personal reserves most families kept in barrels for themselves – what the French call a “poire pour la soif” or “a pear for thirst” – often marking important years in family history or saved for rainy days or just to see how a particularly fine vintage would age.

It was Philippe’s curiosity and his instinct that these wines were cultural treasures that began a decades-long mission to track, taste, catalog, and preserve them. Over more than twenty years, he painstakingly negotiated for these rare foudres and demi-muids, eventually building the largest collection of historic French Vin Doux Naturel in existence. Journalists and winemakers soon began calling him L’Archiviste: the guardian of a vanishing tradition, the man preserving the soul of Roussillon’s fortified wines one barrel at a time.

Today, Philippe remains essential to acquisitions, still mining cellars for hidden vintages, unearthing wines made 40, 50, even 100 years ago. His project is no longer simply his passion; it has become a living archive that continues to grow, evolve, and educate future generations about a remarkable regional style.

In recent years, this vision crystallized under a single unifying label: L’Archiviste. While historic domaine and château names remain on older releases, all new discoveries will be released under the L’Archiviste label.

Philippe’s work goes beyond collecting. He collaborates with regional authorities and the French government to verify each barrel’s provenance, ensuring that every bottled vintage is traceable to its family, vineyard, and year. The result is a curated treasury of Vin Doux Naturel unmatched in breadth and precision.

Philippe has always insisted that these wines must not be understood as a monolith. Terroir matters. Elevation, exposure, and soils—from schist to limestone to clay—shape distinct identities across the three great appellations of French Catalonia:

Rivesaltes provides wines of breadth and spice, structured yet lifted, often marked by dried orchard fruit, walnut, and subtle oxidative finesse. The wines from Maury are dense and powerful, with dark fruit, cocoa, and black tea notes shaped by heat-retaining schist slopes inland from Perpignan. And finally, the Banyuls bottlings are saline, fine-boned, and maritime in influence, as this is an area where Mediterranean breezes temper concentration and lend a savory, mineral profile.

With ongoing acquisitions and releases, L’Archiviste is not only a label - it is a preservation project, an act of cultural stewardship, and a rare opportunity to taste the past with clarity and precision.