The Filmmaker Who Became the Mountain: Guillaume Bodin & the Little Planets
After twenty years traveling the world's vineyards — Mâconnais, Burgundy, New Zealand — Guillaume Bodin planted his flag in Chamoson, in the Swiss canton of Valais, and founded Domaine des Petites Planètes in 2022. Biodynamic farming, indigenous yeasts only, and nine grape varieties bottled as small, luminous planets: alpine wine as an act of devotion, not a job.
Origin — Twenty Years to Find the Mountain
Guillaume Bodin was born in 1986 in Haute-Savoie, on the French side of the Alps, and came to wine the way some people come to faith — gradually, then completely. He learned the cellar at Domaine Tripoz in the Mâconnais, where he learned to listen to nature and work with living soils, then spent years with the Bret brothers in Vinzelles, in southern Burgundy, where no selected yeast ever touched a ferment and sulfur was reduced to a whisper. The agronomist Pierre Masson gave him the biodynamic grammar that still structures everything he does.
Along the way, Bodin became something rare: a vigneron-cinéaste, a winemaker-filmmaker whose documentary La Clef des Terroirs traveled the world of natural wine with a camera instead of a suitcase. The Valais took his breath away as early as 2012 — its sunlit terraces, dry-stone walls, and emblematic grapes, Petite Arvine and Humagne Rouge. In 2018, fate brought him to Fully, where he spent three and a half years as the right hand of Marie-Thérèse Chappaz, the pioneer of Swiss biodynamics. By the time he left, the certainty was total: it was here, in these mountains, that his quest would find its meaning.
In 2022, the land answered. A first parcel in Chamoson welcomed him — on the terroir of Pré des Pierres — and the village's winemakers opened a few more well-situated plots. Domaine des Petites Planètes was born: a small range, nine grape varieties, and a name that says the ambition without saying it — little planets, each bottle its own world.
The Place — Terraces, Stone Walls & Nine Grapes
Chamoson sits on the right bank of the Rhône in the Valais, where the Alps descend in sun-drenched terraces stitched together by generations of dry-stone walls. It is one of Switzerland's most storied wine villages — a Grand Cru terroir in local parlance — and Bodin chose it for precisely the reasons the name suggests: grape diversity, the solidarity of the village's growers, and soils that speak.
Biodynamics Rooted in Agronomy
The farming is organic and biodynamic, in the agronomic tradition of Pierre Masson. In winter, green manures — rye, clover, phacelia — cover the vines to feed the soil and stir microbial life. Every season is punctuated by the classic preparations: horn manure (500P), horn silica (501), and, since 2022, compost tea as an essential ritual — an ode to life, in Bodin's words.
The Herbal Pharmacy
Against mildew and powdery mildew, the arsenal is a garden, not a lab: herbal teas of horsetail, nettle, chamomile, and yarrow, plus fermented extracts of comfrey, fern, and alfalfa to strengthen the vine's own defenses. No chemical product has touched these vines or these wines — a conviction forged across two decades and kept without exception.
Nine Grape Varieties
The range runs on Petite Arvine, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Gamaret, Garanoir, Gamay, Merlot, Humagne Rouge, and Syrah — noble and rustic varieties alike, chosen for what the mountain, not the market, asks for. Petite Arvine is the estate's first white and its emblem; Humagne Rouge and Cornalin carry the red heritage of the Valais.
A Négoce of Trust
Part of the range is négoce — fruit from the trusted plots of Chamoson's growers — and part is estate. What unifies them is not ownership but method: every vineyard worked biodynamically, every wine fermented with indigenous yeasts. In a village of shared walls and shared values, the distinction matters less than the practice.
Winemaking — Only a Ferryman
The cellar at Petites Planètes is an extension of the vineyard's logic: nature continues its work, and the winemaker's job is to not interrupt it. Only indigenous yeasts guide the ferments — never a selected strain, never an enological input, never an enzyme, never fining. The Brett brothers' whisper of sulfur became Bodin's doctrine: small doses of volcanic sulfur, added only at the end of fermentation and just before bottling, enough for stability, never enough to flatten the wine's vitality.
Macerations are deliberately short, to preserve the finesse of primary aromas and the brilliance of the fruit. The wines that result are vivid and chiseled — citrus and alpine flowers in the Petite Arvine, forest berries and subtle spice in the reds, and sometimes a saline or smoky touch inherited straight from the Valais soils.
Bodin describes himself as "only a ferryman" — un passeur — hoping his wines will resonate within the drinker like an echo of the landscapes that gave them. It is the filmmaker's humility applied to fermentation: the terroir is the story; he is merely the lens.
The Wines — Small Planets, Alpine Sun
A compact, vivid range built on the Valais's indigenous spine: the whites led by Petite Arvine, the reds led by Humagne Rouge, Syrah, and Pinot Noir — each one a world, each one unmistakably Chamoson.
Petite Arvine
The emblematic white — the soul of the Swiss AlpsBodin's first white could only be Petite Arvine, the grape anchored in the soul of these mountains. Chiseled, vibrant with citrus, shot through with a unique alpine freshness — a wine that, like the landscape itself, is unlike any other. ~12.5% ABV.
Mercure
The planet blend — a red assemblage of the estate's worldThe red planet: roughly 60% Pinot Noir, 30% Merlot, and small shares of Humagne Rouge and Syrah in a blend that reads like a map of the Valais itself — silky red fruit from the Pinot, structure from the south, spice from the mountain grapes. AOC Valais.
Syrah de Chamoson
The old-vine red — dark matter from the terracesFrom an old vine of Syrah on the Chamoson terraces — the Rhône variety pushed to its northern, alpine extreme. Light in frame but perfumed and serious, with the smoked-meat and violet signature of high-altitude Syrah. ~14% ABV.
Humagne Rouge, Gamay & the Rest
The heritage wing — the mountain's own grapesThe estate's living archive: Humagne Rouge — rustic, herbal, unmistakably Valaisan — alongside Gamay, Gamaret, Garanoir, and Pinot Noir, plus a rosé and a Pinot Gris. Small volumes, high devotion; the range is the village in bottle.
Legacy — Two Lenses, One Devotion
Guillaume Bodin's legacy is being written on two tracks at once. As a filmmaker, he spent years documenting the world's natural-wine growers — proof that terroir could be a subject of cinema, not just commerce. As a vigneron, he has now put himself inside that story, in one of Europe's most underappreciated wine regions, farming biodynamically at the foot of the Alps while most of the world's attention looked elsewhere.
The estate's existence is itself a quiet argument. A Frenchman from Haute-Savoie, trained in Burgundy and Mâconnais, apprenticed to the pioneer of Swiss biodynamics, chose the Valais — and the village of Chamoson chose him back, lending him plots, trust, and a place in its centuries-old wall of terraces. That mutual faith is the model: wine as a communal act.
Bodin also works beyond his own cellar, advising Swiss estates toward more virtuous viticulture through his consultancy Biodynamie & Cie. The legacy, then, is not only the bottles — which are vivid, sincere, and increasingly sought after — but the spread of a method and a mindset across a whole mountain of vines. The ferryman is carrying more than his own cargo.