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Rhone/southern France Producers
Name: Rhone/southern France
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Domaines Ott is and always has been a family-owned business. The Ott family themselves are still involved, from foundation in 1912 to the present day. Since 2004 the business has been in the more than capable hands of the family behind Champagne Louis Roederer and together they have made Domaines Ott into arguably Provence`s finest and certainly most iconic rosé producer. They make intense yet very pale rosés and use only natural fertilisers, strict controls on yield and very little use of chemicals in the vineyards. -
`He only makes a couple of wines, how long can this take?` In the end, Paul-Vincent Avril got a strong nomination for winemaker we would most like to spend more time with. The man is thoughtful, strong in his views and very clear in his aims. One can get a strong impression that from an early age he planned a career which led inexorably to the helm at Clos des Papes. Life is more chaotic than that of course,but his trajectory through the wine trade seemed to be an almost perfect preparation.
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Remizieres is one of those domains that has crept up on the market over the last few years. For a long time it produced understated wines, which were very dry and restrained, but under Philippe Desmeure and the eponymous Emilie of the prestige cuvee, the house style has changed. Still fruit-oriented, and still managed to produce ripe fruit but not raisins, the increased use of new oak over the last ten years or so has been a positive; a proliferation of one-off cuvees in peculiar years less so.
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Rene Rostaing spent his working lifetime defending the idea that Côte Rôtie should taste like Côte Rôtie, not like Hermitage, and certainly not like new world Syrah – and making wines to justify the claim. The winemaking here has always been deeply rooted in local tradition, not to mention some extremely well-sited old vines. The domaine began with parcels inherited from two of the region’s greatest pioneers. Rene’s father-in-law Albert Dervieux, and his uncle Marius Gentaz-Dervieux.
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Didier Negron, who is married to a Sabon daughter, is now the hands-on force here, with a lot of input from the affable Jean-Jacques - the latter a man with a striking resemblance to Sven Goran, save for his team`s over performance and a lack of Stelvin. Screw or no screw however, this is a forward looking estate with a wholehearted embrace of modern technology where appropriate. These wines are lovely, with depth, complexity and finesse. They show many flavours and age extremely well.
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Down in Provence, between Marseille and Toulon, set in a landscape of scrub and pine forest about 4 miles from the coast, you`ll find Domaine Tempier. Mourvedre is king down here. Once upon a time vignerons were ripping it out to make way for higher-yielding varieties, but in the late 1930s Lucien Peyraud at Domaine Tempier led the fightback; the establishment of the Mourvedre-based Bandol AOC that tags Tempier bottles is mainly down to his efforts.
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Solid granite is the matter which makes up these vineyards and, it seems, the wines they produce. Thierry Allemand is a brilliant but complicated man who towers over others in the appellation not just in height but in quality. He is well known for operating a low or no sulphur regime in his winery. Syrah doesn`t need as much as some people give it anyway, and he takes advantage of this. In the days - a brief 30 or 40 years ago - when the Rhone was in the same sort of trouble that much of the Languedoc is now, Cornas was the most vulnerable AOC. -
Exposed to all the vagaries of sun, hail and the fierce Mistral wind, entirely covered with the rounded stones left by departing glaciers, the La Crau plateau is one of the most extreme locations in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. It is so high that it was once the site of a telegraph station ferrying messages between Paris and Marseille. The vines hug the ground, and if you have visited in February during a strong Mistral, you will understand why. But this unforgiving site also brings forth one of the region’s most refined and elegant wines - Vieux Telegraphe.
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No longer the new kid on the block, but now acknowledged as one of the great producers of the contemporary Rhone, Vincent Paris is a child of the area who inherited some of his best vines from his grandfather, and bought more from his uncle, the great Robert Michel. His vineyards take in the austere granite slopes of Cornas where the light is plentiful and the Mistral intense, and his direct neighbours are Thierry Allemand and Auguste Clape. The soils are poor here, and the rocky motherlode is often exposed; vines struggle, but the quality of fruit they give is intense.
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Yves Cuilleron never meant to be a winemaker. He trained as an engineer. But there was too much history behind him; three generations each on both the maternal and paternal line. When his uncle decided to retire from the family domaine with no successor lined up, the family considered selling. It jolted Yves. `I didn’t have a moment’s hesitation. I could no longer imagine being anything but a vigneron.` After a year at the Ecole Viticole in Burgundy, he took over, and his methodical, scientific approach informs his whole approach to winemaking.
