Dear Member,
In his book about his travels through France, importer Kermit Lynch describes the old way of winemaking:
The taste of the grape told them when to harvest.
The taste of the wine told them when to bottle, what sort of oak to employ, the appropriate barrel size, how to prune different grape varieties…If the taste of the wine indicated that a steep, stony piece of land produced better wine, then that was the land they worked, regardless of the labor involved.
If the public taste changed, they did not rip out their Pineau vines in order to plant Chardonnay. […]
They seem to have been instinctively directed toward quality. Only in this century have we seen the hard-earned knowledge of the ancients discarded, almost overnight, in the name of progress.
Over the last couple of decades, in almost every country, trust in tradition has been tossed aside in favor of catering to public taste.
But the French are a rebellious lot. Just try taking a train from Bordeaux to Paris at the end of August and see if your trip isn’t disrupted by a sudden revolutionary zeal among the train workers. This is, after all, the country where advocates of Roquefort cheese destroy McDonald’s restaurants.
Similarly, there remains an undercurrent among Gallic winemakers of anti-modernism, and rebellion as an embrace of tradition rather than its destruction.
For our second-ever French collection, we focused on finding the iconoclasts, the upstarts, and the dark horses. Our search led us from the Haut-Médoc, where the Gironde River meets the Atlantic, down through the Rhône Valley, to the Languedoc, where white stone villages sit on the Mediterranean coast.
In This Box
You will find six bottles:
Domaine Aléofane Crozes-Hermitage 2019
Château Ventenac Le Mas 2015
Les Prunelles de Montblanc Cuvée Prestige 2019
Château Vieille Tour Côtes de Bordeaux Exception 2018
Marquis de Saint-Estèphe Château Léo de Prades 2016
Clefs des Murailles Vacqueyras 2018
These are hot-weather zones, without the chill of Champagne or Bourgogne. As such, this is probably our most potent collection outside of Argentine imports.
But if you focus on raw power, you’ll miss the far more interesting element that brings these wines together: a pure expression of terroir. From the red pebble soils of Vacqueyras, to Montblanc’s sea breezes, to the limestone hills of Cadillac, these wines could not have come from anywhere other than exactly where they were made.
À votre santé,
Will Bonner
Founder, Bonner Private Wine Partnership
