In the hinterland of Nice, a family cultivates the land as one nurtures a friendship: with patience, without forcing anything. A portrait of a place where organic isn't a label, but a way of being in the world.
It was Sophie Poudou who opened the doors of La Joséphine to us. Head of development, she readily introduces herself as the house's messenger—the one who carries the voice of Stephanie Brès and Jean-François Blanc's family, who initiated the entire adventure. And it only took a few minutes to understand that we weren't just going to visit an estate: we were going to listen to someone talk about what they love. Sophie is one of those passionate people who make you taste a tomato mid-sentence, who stop in front of a stone wall as if in front of an old accomplice, and who transform a morning at the farm into a timeless stroll. She invited us to discover this universe—the garden, the olive trees, the oil, the table—and that's the thread we followed, from the vegetable patch to the plate.
The name of a love
The memory of Jean-Louis Brès is at the origin of everything. Stephanie Brès' father, he had a real passion for Napoleon. It is to him that the brand owes its name, its identity and even part of its graphic universe, where many details discreetly pay homage to the Emperor.
Before talking about terroir, olive trees or know-how, we must talk about a story. La Joséphine is a tribute to Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's wife and, above all, his great love.
But behind this historical reference lies a much more intimate tribute. Jean-Louis Brès is not only the inspiration for this identity: he is its starting point. It is in the continuation of what he passed on that the Brès and Blanc families chose to take over these lands, to cultivate the olive trees, to raise bees and to keep this place alive with the same passion.
La Joséphine thus carries two love stories that echo each other: that of a man for a woman, and that of a family for the one who passed on this passion to them. Because the most beautiful projects are not born only from an idea; they are born from transmission. And we never cultivate as well as what we love. Here, it can be felt in every tree, every harvest and every gesture.
A garden that follows the seasons
It all starts with the vegetable garden, in La Roquette-sur-Var. Eight gardens, twenty by thirty meters each, where nearly fifty varieties of fruits and vegetables grow. But it's not the number that's striking—it's the way everything breathes together.
Sophie has a word for it: rotation. From one season to the next, vegetables—roots, leaves, flowers—are alternated so as not to exhaust the soil. And when a plot has given a lot, it's not pushed: it's allowed to rest. Vetch, mustard, comfrey are sown there, left to grow all winter before being buried, like a meal given back to the soil. The earth thus feeds itself; we only accompany it.
This is where you grasp what organic truly means at La Joséphine. Not a box to tick, but a matter of perspective. "Organic is both very slow and very fast," Sophie smiles. Slow, because a season doesn't rush. Fast, because one too many critters, an onset of disease, and you have to know how to react before nature decides for you. So we rely on allies rather than products: ladybugs that clean aphids, or those tiny insects released into the tomatoes to keep the leaf-mining fly in check—we even give them a little food at first, until they get their bearings.
And then there's this phrase that says it all: "You can do much more than what organic dictates." Here, flowers are left between the rows; things are allowed to live. Far from the neat, square fields of television, the vegetable garden looks like a beautiful, ordered jungle—peppers a stone's throw from Nice courgettes, small pear-shaped yellow tomatoes picked and eaten on the spot, melons that we didn't dare plant but turned out to be incredibly sweet. Three thousand leeks that will take four months to emerge from the ground, new potatoes kept in the soil as long as possible rather than being treated. We taste a strawberry, a beefsteak tomato still warm from the sun—and we understand that taste, here, is not a selling point. It's simply what happens when things are done well.
Olive trees, or the art of patience
Around eleven o'clock, we gain altitude, towards Levens, and there the landscape begins to tell centuries of stories. Everything is in terraced fields – these dry stone walls that the ancients patiently carved into the slope to gain a little flat land. They were called the "planks": they wanted them wide, and the olive trees were planted right on the edge, like sentinels, to preserve the precious space for crops. This is the famous Mediterranean trilogy that can be read here, on the hillside: the olive tree, the vine, wheat and chickpeas – the simple balance of what nourishes.
La Joséphine's olive trees—nearly fifteen hundred of them—are of a variety unique to the Nice region: the cailletier, a drooping tree, a cousin of neighboring Liguria, a legacy of a land that was Italian until 1860. Sophie speaks of it as a living being, because it is. Pruning an olive tree, she says, is starting a conversation that will last its whole life: the first snip on a young tree determines its shape forever. It is opened to let in light and air, its main branches are chosen, it is guided without ever being forced. The entire craft lies in a question she beautifully poses: what do I take from the tree because I want oil, and what do I leave it because it remains a tree?
Some of these olive trees are three or four hundred years old. Enough to put a man's life in its proper perspective. "You only spend a part of your life with them," Sophie confides. You care for them, you prune them, and one day you pass them on. Transmission, here, is not a promise of the future: it is the very present of the estate, this thread stretched between generations—from the father who dreamed of this place to those who bring it to life today.
And then there are the walls. These dry stone walls, built without any cement, that have held the terraces for generations. They do much more than hold the earth: they swell under heavy rains, absorb ground movements where concrete would eventually crack, retain moisture in their stones to return it to the tree when it needs it, and shelter a whole little life of insects in the process. Sophie could talk about them for hours – it's her passion. We readily believe her.
Oil, a pure fruit juice
The olive, she reminds us, is one of the few fruits in our region to ripen in the middle of winter. It then slowly fills with oil, and the yield remains modest: it takes about five kilograms of olives for just one liter. Suffice it to say that nothing, here either, encourages haste.
At the mill, the olive is washed, crushed, then thoroughly stirred and just barely warmed—never beyond twenty-seven degrees, the invisible boundary of "first cold pressing." One degree too much and it's damaged; a little too cool and the oil refuses to yield. All the miller's art lies on this thread, and in that precise moment—guessed by eye, by nose—when he knows it's time to open the valve. Then comes the separation, by the sole force of rotation and the different weights of water and oil. The finest, those presented in competitions, are born almost untouched: they are simply left to rest for a few days, allowing the water to settle and the oil to rise naturally. This is what lies behind the small mention "cold pressed, by mechanical processes" on a label: no heat, no press, no artifice. In the end, it's not quite an oil you taste. It's, as Sophie says, a pure fruit juice.
The table, a natural fit
The day ends at the Auberge du Redier, in Colomars, where La Joséphine sometimes offers tastings. Around a simple and generous table, we find everything we saw emerge: the oil, the olive paste, the olives — green, reddish-brown, ripe black, these three colors that give an oil from here its character. We taste, we compare, we listen a little more. Then we have lunch on site, because at La Joséphine everything always comes back to this primary gesture: sitting at the table and sharing what the land has graciously offered.
Perhaps that, ultimately, is the true luxury of this place. Not the exception, but the rightness. A family, a land, trees older than us, a name born of love — and time, that long-forgotten time, as the only true ingredient.
If you feel like stepping through the estate's door yourself, La Joséphine sometimes opens its gardens and olive groves for a visit. Simply inquire at www.la-josephine.com
