The name La Tartugo comes from its tutelary animals, the tortoises in its enclosed garden. In the 1930's, when it was still allowed, with mummy's father Eugène Boussuge, the young Maurice Turle went and fetched the first couple in the forest around Les Mayons, in the foothills of the old Maures range. From there comes Testudo Hermann Hermanni, the only French local species. Today, it is forbidden to take away the tortoises from their habitat, to carry them and to buy and sell them, as it is now an endangered species.  

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           In the mid-XIX c., the family of Berthe Signoret (above), the wife of Charles Turle (left, in his musician's uniform), mother of Édouard Turle (right) and grand-mother of Maurice and Denise, owned the barn next door. Between 1850, when it was built, and 1893, when it was bought by Charles Turle, who had been living there as a tenant for some time, the house was a local store and a bouchonnerie, where workers cut corks ; this business was then relocated accross the street. There are few remnants of these previous trades : a board stating the goods that were sold in the shop, and scuffed tiles in what is today the translator's (Bernard Turle, Maurice's and Marie-Thérèse's son, brother of Marie-Chantal and Odile, husband of Didier). According to Élisabeth - Édouard's wife - whom everyone called Mimi, and whose bedroom it was, the women would sort through the cork there, sitting on the tiles ; a fly curtain made of hundreds of corks ; and the wallpaintings of what for more than a century has been the upstairs dining room but was probably then the room where the owners of the bouchonnerie would welcome customers.

            After the bouchonnerie came the winery. In the 1920's the cellar was built, at the back of the barn, on the garden side, while on the street side Édouard started the petrol station. The in-laws, the Turles and the Boussuges, lived together in La Tartugo. 

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          The house was the headquarters of the winery, even though it was not situated on the vineyard, but along the old Roman road. This street, which cuts through the village, was then lined with plane trees on both sides and shops on the south side ; the tiny shop at La Tartugo was in the room that is now the downstairs bathroom. Formerly, before the regrouping of lands favoured as from the 1970's, the vineyard was a collection of isolated plots chosen for their adaptability to such and such grape variety. But the wine was made at la Tartugo. One can still see the press in the workshop and, in the cellar, the built-in concrete vats and the wooden vats : one can still read the last words and numbers that Maurice scribbled in 1979, his last harvest, on the wood that has since dried up. The dusty vats seem set in time.

               In 2017, due to rosé wine from Provence benefitting from a global boom, Coteaux des Petits Brons went back into business. The land, which still bears the Côtes de Provence label even after all these years, is tilled by young farmers of the Gaudin family of Carnoules. The wine (expected first crop in 2021) won't be made at La Tartugo but at the Coopérative in Puget-Ville, the village nearby where part of the Turles lived in the XVIIIth century : it will nevertheless be the wine of the family vineyard and the senses of the house will no doubt be reawakened by the floating aromas of the grape must of the XXIst century.