On 19 September 2026, Château Bas opens its private gardens and its Roman sanctuary for the European Heritage Days. Behind the event, a rarer fact deserves attention: a contemporary wine estate continues to live around an ancient temple listed as early as 1840, whose archaeological strata precede the Gallo-Roman settlement of the site.
In Vernègues, in the Coteaux d’Aix, wine is therefore not merely set against a heritage backdrop. It cohabits with a piece of history that obliges one to think about the landscape differently.
The estate of Château Bas was built on the site of an ancient Gallo-Roman town. A few steps from the vines stands a temple dated to the decade 30 to 20 BCE. The building appears on the first French list of historic monuments, drawn up in 1840 and comprising 1,034 monuments. Of the three ancient temples still preserved in France, it is presented as the only one located in the countryside.
This singularity changes how the place is read. Here, heritage is neither peripheral nor added after the fact: it precedes the estate as it is known today. The excavations carried out on the site have in fact established that the temple predates the Gallo-Roman settlement. The sanctuary was probably associated with a deity linked to water, a hypothesis fed by the presence of a spring nearby.
For the forty-third edition of the European Heritage Days, the Castéja family, owner of Château Bas, has chosen to open to the public spaces that are usually private. From 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., visitors will be able to walk through the gardens leading to the sanctuary, follow guided tours and discover a retrospective of the various excavation campaigns.
The most interesting device is perhaps the three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the temple. It obviously does not replace the reading of the remains; it rather gives back volume to a building whose architectural meaning has partly faded with time. In a sector where immersive experiences readily become a spectacular argument, the use of 3D takes on a different function here: making an archaeological hypothesis visible and helping to understand what the landscape no longer shows.
The wine estate thus finds itself placed in an unusual temporality. The cycles of the vine, often invoked as a symbol of slowness, seem almost short next to a sanctuary more than two millennia old. This collision also obliges one to qualify the notion of “Maison heritage”. At Château Bas, the inheritance is not solely that of a family or of winemaking know-how; it belongs to a territorial history that predates the current owners.
The tasting of the estate’s wines, planned among the vines, thus takes on a different relief. It ties present economic activity to a site whose uses succeeded one another long before contemporary viticulture. The interesting gesture is not to pretend that wine directly extends Antiquity, but to accept the coexistence of current production, agricultural landscape and heritage responsibility.
The European Heritage Days were born in France in 1984 under the impetus of Jack Lang, before gradually extending to Europe. Their interest lies precisely in this kind of opening: making accessible places part of which usually remains out of sight. At Château Bas, this logic goes beyond the visit of a château. It allows one to enter an estate where archaeology, landscape and wine overlap without merging.
A broader question remains: how does a private estate maintain, document and pass on a heritage that exceeds its own story? The September opening provides a first answer through access, mediation and reconstruction. What follows will depend on the capacity to keep making the sanctuary not an image argument, but an object of shared knowledge.
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