By creating a distillery, specializing in the production of whisky, Greta and François wanted to give meaning to their professional lives and promote the products of the family farm.
It was a radical change of direction that François Pagès and his partner, Greta Krpciarova, made last year. After a very rich and dense professional life, all over the world, respectively as a wine sales manager and sommelier, the couple decided to settle down in Cantal, to start a family and create their own business.
The Hautes Terres distillery was born in François’ head after a trip to Scotland, undoubtedly the largest whisky producer in the world. “Scotland has a lot in common with Auvergne, and I said to myself that we could reproduce that here and make a distillery.” The project matured and then took on its full meaning during Covid, while François and Greta “were stuck in Africa.”
A family project
But there is no question of making just any whisky, and even less so in just any way.
The idea was to launch a project related to wine and the world of spirits by promoting my family’s farm, established in Molèdes in the commune of Laveissenet since 1848, and a territory. Because like a great wine, a great whisky must be the most authentic expression of the place where it comes from.
Jean-François, his cousin, 6th generation of the Pagès family, now the sole head of the Salers cow farm, which grows barley, rye, wheat and triticale to feed his animals, still needs to be convinced. “He accepted, because it was me, because it’s a family project,” explains François, who is embarking on this new adventure from Africa, before returning to France for good last October. “I had the farm, then I needed all the process and equipment.”
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He then began by ordering the still from “the best available. I chose a Stupfler®, the Rolls-Royce of stills, which took nearly two and a half years to arrive,” he says. In the meantime, he and his wife trained in brewing and distillation, and they set to work on the production,
at friends’ houses, according to our own recipes but not yet with cereals from the farm.
We will have to wait until July 2025 before we can taste the first bottles, around 5,000, of their single malt with Maltese barley and their rye with rye.The first whiskies are still waiting patiently in the barrels, before being tasted in July 2025. Photo @lœildeos.studio
Currently based in premises in the Neussargues en Pinatelle business village, while waiting for the construction of their own building on land they have just acquired nearby, François and Greta are refining their recipes and working, with the head of the family farm, on growing rye and barley. Raw materials that they will use for the first time next spring. And to keep them waiting, “because it takes three years to make a whisky”, the couple has just released an organic range of gin and vermouth, which are also local.
Thus, by deciding to control the raw materials and all the stages of manufacturing, “the only thing we don’t do is the malt,” says François, the Distillerie Hautes Terres has opted for a 100% local whisky. “The objective,” says the new business leader, “is 30 tons of cereals and 20,000 bottles per year.”
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Isabelle Barnerias
