nostalgia sequence around the La Viette dairy, in Gâtine

Nostalgia can also be sweet as whey. So we had quite a gulp of it this weekend in Vouhé. At the cost of a lot of work to exhume documents used to shed light on the one hundred and twenty-six years of history of the La Viette dairy, Jean-Louis Neveu presented the first fruits of his quest for testimonies, archives and even old films, Friday November 8, 2024 in the evening.

It is an understatement to say that the local collective memory is very attached to this former jewel riveted to the La Viette watercourse, on the borders of Vouhé and Soutiers. We felt a lot of shivers run through the assembly.

“Seeing the local flagship disappear always hurts my heart”

Was it really a surprise to find a village hall in Vouhé (355 inhabitants) packed with one hundred and ten people who had come to treat themselves to this unique one-night cinema session, complete with these famous old found films? We always remain naturally cautious, out of modesty, with matters of affect in Gâtine. However, it is now obvious that the secret closure of the dairy on November 25, 2022 was a real heartbreak for many.

With up to a thousand local breeders supplying La Viette in its heyday, the round of milk cans has marked the history of many families in this part of Gâtine. We cannot imagine the footprint left here by this dairy which is still capable, in 2021, of producing, among other things, a thousand tonnes of butter with its gondola head stamped AOP Charentes-Poitou.

Friday evening, in Vouhé, it was as if speech were suddenly freed. “Seeing the local flagship disappear always hurts my heart. The idea is not to languish but to bring together this memory to reconstruct the history of this place which represents not only an industrial history but a great agricultural and social adventure. Jean-Louis Neveu told the audience.

A very palpable emotion in the audience

As the images rolled by, it was very moving to hear the whispers in the audience, some listing the names of the people who appeared on the screen, while religiously passing around a notebook to record their name and any possible documents or testimonies in his possession.

Jean-Yves Carou, former mayor of Vouhé who managed the dairy, recalled the good times, when the Lenôtre gastronomic house came to choose its butter. He saw the list of local milk suppliers melt, like a lump of butter in the sun, from a thousand in the beginning to around fifteen in the 1980s.

In the audience, Daniel Rouvreau did not miss a beat of this tour which went to the stronghold of his childhood in Beaulieu. He who presided over the destiny of the dairy in his last cooperative breath, saw poignant images of the family farm in action flash on the screen at the time of the dairy tour, with his dad Denis and his eighteen Parthenaises . These cows produced milk at the gates of the Château de La Guyonnière and even drank the water from the moat which froze more than usual at the time when winter came.

Thanks to these films, Daniel saw his mother again, his sister Michelle, the round of the truck driven by Albert Boinot, Michel's father who shot these images. And he smiled with tenderness in front of Bayonne, this sacred female dog from the Guyonnière farm: when a weak milking had barely given enough milk to line the bottom of the can, she sometimes siphoned, surreptitiously, this famous nectar which was, for one hundred and twenty-six years, the white gold of La Viette.