Kefir has been around for centuries. In early 20th-century France it was called graines vivantes — living grains — passed between households like a gift. No one owned the culture. You fed it, it fed you back.
Maël Le Noguillard and Marie-Noëlle Bourgeois arrived in Padern in 2022. They came to grow saffron first — planting trees alongside it, slowly trying to restore an arid and fragile ecosystem in the Hautes-Corbières. Maël is a fermentation obsessive: kefir, koji, lacto-fermented vegetables. Marie-Noëlle is a micro-nutritionist with a deep interest in living cultures and what they do inside the body. Since early 2025, production has moved into Padern's old cooperative cellar — the same space where natural winemaker Hortense Betton vinified her 2023 vintage.
The base of every SafranFou kefir is the same: a live culture of bacteria and wild yeasts, raw cane sugar, lemon juice, filtered water, dried figs — and then whatever defines that particular recipe. The saffron comes from their own field, harvested stigma by stigma at dawn. The fig leaf version uses leaves gathered from trees growing around the saffron plot. More recently, Maël has been working with koji — the fermentation culture behind miso and sake — which adds texture, complexity, and a finish that evolves noticeably from the first sip to the last. Fermentation runs to completion in every batch. No residual sugar, no softness to hide behind.
The result sits somewhere between a sparkling wine and something that has no category yet. Dry, precise, alive — and completely at home at the table.
