company visits in the Cote D'Azur

Today, we visited a vineyard in the French Riviera, Bellet region. They produce 35,000 bottles per year. We sampled a white, rose, and red that were each fantastic. The French wines are very regulated by the AOC which dictates what grapes can be grown, bans pesticides, and even limits watering.


http://www.chateau-cremat.com/

Tomorrow, we will visit a cosmetics lab in Monoco.

Asepta makes lotions, wrinkle damage, mascara, nail polish in the most prestigious corner of the world.
Asepta does 20M Euros in sales with 250 products and has under 150 employees. They have been in business 60 years and do their own design and manufacture. 50% of the products are exports, but the US is a difficult market. Most of their products treat muscle or skin symptoms and therefore look like a drug to the FDA.

We watched them make batches of foot cremes and hair conditioners and the high tech mixers and packaging equipment were impressive. In order to get a creme from water and coco butter, they have to heat the mixture to 70C and stir the batch under vacuum. The packaging equipment ranged from filling the containers to labeling the containers and shrink wrapping bundles of tubes.
The products are intended to guarantee a 3yr shelf life and they save two samples from every batch made for 5yr in case there is a problem and they need to go back and analyze the batch.


We witnessed a very lean operation which is required due to the very limited space available and extremely high real estate prices in Monoco.

REAL ESTATE : apartments run about $1000/ m^2 and business rent is about $12/ m^2 / month.
[UPDATE] pix