// WIRED US/UK — FINANZA
There’s a Completely New Type of Whisky. It’s French and Made in Concrete Eggs
The vines on Bordeaux’s Right Bank next to the Dordogne were first planted by Roman troops and settlers in the first century CE. Known for Merlot-dominant blends, with its clay and limestone soils, this region of France delivers softer, fruitier wines. If you're a fan of Pomerol or St-Émilion, this is your nirvana.
It is here you will find Maison Lineti, happily shunning 2,000 years of tradition by making not wine, but whisky. French whisky. A thousand miles or so from the distilleries of Scotland and Ireland, this small company is making the spirit in a way whisky has never been made before.
Even though Maison Lineti is not making wine, it is, in what is apparently a world first, applying wine-science methods to fermentation, distillation, and maturation for its whisky. The result is a floral, fresh, mineral, and textured spirit.
After the producer hosted the prestigious World Whisky Forum in June 2025, its methods have set the industry all aflutter. Why? Not only does the product taste exceptional, Lineti's groundbreaking techniques are bringing its spirit to the bottle years faster than traditional players using traditional processes.
The masterminds behind Maison Lineti's wine-made whisky are Magali Picard, a chemical engineer who holds a doctorate in oenology from the University of Bordeaux, and her partner and cofounder, Alex Cosculluela. The company launched in 2018 with their friend Xavier Payan, who studied wine and spirits management alongside Cosculluela.
Maison Lineti’s “egg box” houses seven giant concrete, egg-shaped fermenters that reach to the ceiling.
During pandemic lockdowns, while the rest of us dusted off gaming consoles or mined the more questionable parts of Netflix’s catalog, Picard sharpened her skills gained as a spirits development project manager at barrel-maker Demptos to research a more scientific approach to whisky-making—one that leaned far less heavily on barrel aging for flavor and instead looked to molecular science, sensory analysis, and copious amounts of data. At the time, Picard even posted her progress online as an open logbook of her experiments.
The conclusion Picard and Cosculluela came to after these experiments was this: a great spirit is decided at fermentation, not by age. “Whisky makers are very focused on the style of cask. It's not our vision,” says Picard.
“What we try to do is not increase the production but focus on the quality of the whisky, and more precisely on the steps before the maturation,” Picard says. “We worked on the quality of the wash—the liquid issued from the fermentation, just like in the wine industry. We worked a lot on techniques used in the wine industry. For example, the use of lactic bacteria during the fermentation, and the use of lees aging—which is a process used for champagne or Chardonnay wines to increase the rawness.”
Magali Picard, right, and cofounder Alex Cosculluela, left, started Maison Lineti to produce whisky using winemaking techniques.