My wife and I made an impromptu trip to Provence at the end of December. It was not a wine-centric visit, but we managed to work in a stop at Domaine Tempier in Bandol. And I had a half day on my own at the end which used to revisit Chateauneuf and Gigondas, where I hadn’t spent any time in more than 20 years.
We got there for the cold snap that brought snow to places like Sicily. It was sunny or hazy the whole week we were there, but mostly frigid, with frosts at night and temperatures in the 30s Fahrenheit most of the time and the bitter Mistral wind. Not your idea of a Mediterranean get-away.
Here are a few brief notes.
Domaine Tempier: This visit was something of a belated a pilgrimage. Kermit Lynch used to wax poetic in his newsletters about the domaine and the Peyraud family, and I bought and drank their wines in the 80s. I own Richard Olney’s “Lulu’s Provencal Table,” based on Lulu Peyraud’s cooking. I was slated to go there with sometime-Berserker Claude Kolm in 1994, where Olney and Lynch would join us for lunch. Sadly, I got a vicious case of food poisoning in Beaujolais and ended up flying to London to recuperate. The thought of an afternoon of wine and spit-roasted pork had no appeal.
With decades of build-up, I was a little surprised to find the estate so close by the Nice-Marseilles autoroute. Still, it was well worth the visit. Veronique Peyraud hosted us.
2015 Bandol rose: I’ve heard so many people extoll the rose in recent years, but it had been ages since I’d had one. Outstanding! Only 24 hours on the skin, so there’s almost no hint of color, but it has a flavor depth you find in few whites. First rate, from a strong vintage. Try this on your friends who think they don’t like white or rose. 2014 Bandol rouge: Veronique said they lost 20% of the harvest to hail and rain. Still, the basic rouge was full-bodied and fresh. Not an ager, she said, but an excellent wine. 2013 Bandol rouge: A moderate step up – a bit fuller, a bit smoother. Can’t tell how much is the vintage and how much is the extra year of age, but this, too, is first class. It was a very good vintage.
The single vineyards were not offered.
(Why is it that some pix come out sideways even after fixing them in the original???)
The following afternoon I headed north after dropping my wife at the Marseilles airport. Chateauneuf is only about an hour away via the autoroute, but I took the backroads through the Alpilles park south of St. Remy and Eygalières, which we had traversed on a different route a few days earlier. The craggy limestone ridge supports only pine trees and a few vines. It looks like something out of the American Southwest.
Just north of the park, I stopped for lunch in Eygalières, where I had a mediocre glass of Les Baux de Provence from an estate I’d passed a few minutes earlier. The hams, cheese and bread made up for that, though.
The cafe also featured this innovative piece of plumbing:
I hadn’t been in Chateauneuf itself since 1983. I remember the stony soil from that visit. (Also two 20-somethings talking their way into Ch. Rayas, where we were greated grudgingly.)
What I hadn’t recalled was how the vines lean south – presumably because of the Mistral. Easy to understand on a frigid January day when you had to lean into the wind.
Beaucastel and Vieux Telegraph couldn’t see me that day, so I called Domaine Charvin and headed there. I don’t have a lot of experience with their CdP, but wanted to learn more about them. (I’d downed a number of their 50% grenache/50% merlot Vin de Pays for ~$15 a year or two ago.)
There are signs to the estate … until you’re nearly there. But there are no markings on the farm complex itself, so I wasn’t sure if I’d come down the wrong gravel road.
The trek was rewarded though.
2014 Cotes du Rhone: Man, is this a terrific wine. It doesn’t seem to be widely available here. It’s moderately full-bodied and fresh. No steroid-injected Southern Rhone. This tastes like healthy grenache without a lot of inky syrah to muddy things. Yummy! Refreshing.
2014 Chateauneuf: A difficult vintage here, as in Bandol, but Charvin came through. Like the CdR, this is fresh – bright fruit with good acid. (It probably helped that it was only a few degrees above freezing outside, so cellar temperature was probably about refrigerator level.) This would be north of 90 for me.
2013 Chateauneuf: There was a parallel to Tempier here, as the ’13 was a step up from the very solid ’14. Just a bit riper and fuller, but with that same freshness. I loved both these wines.
The soil is quite different here in Maucoil, at the northern end of the appellation, without the typical CdP stones:
After Charvin, I was heading back to Pegau, which I’d passed on my way north. As I passed through the village of Chateauneuf, I came on Domaine Moulin-Tacussel. I’d bought some of their ’01 from Flatiron three years ago and liked that, and their 2010 showed very well in a blind tasting I’d hosted. I bought some of that, too. These are in a lighter style – more balanced for my tastes than a lot of CdP. Eric Asimov praised the 2010 shortly after we tasted it in our group. The estate came into being in 1976 when Mme. Moulin inherited property from her family, the Tacussels.
“What the hell, check it out,” I thought. The contrarian in me liked the idea of not following the herds to Pegau.
As at Charvin, the 2014 and 2013 were both good, but the ’13 was a notch up. The ’15 white was also very fresh and good. These wines aren’t quite up to Charvin’s level, but they’re very solid.
My host turned out to have an English father and a German mother, but she was raised largely in Provence. Eventually she introduced herself as Faye Stephenson. “Very French,” she said with a sly grin.
By the time I left, dusk was approaching. My other mission for the day was to revisit Gigondas and Vacqueyras to remind myself of the topography there. (We’d had an excellent pitcher of unidentified Vacqueyras in a brasserie in Avignon earlier in the week.)
I had to catch a plane that evening, so there was no time to taste. Just enough time to snap some pix of Gigondas and drive along the bench on which the best Cotes du Rhone Villages are produced before scooting down the autoroute to Marseilles.
One more appellation… We fled to Bandol later in our visit to avoid the Mistral. It was still cold there, but better. From there we made a side trip west to Cassis, which, it turns out, is not so sheltered from the Mistral. I sipped some Cassis while shivering in a waterfront cafe. I can’t now recall whose wine. We were too preoccupied avoiding frostbite.
But I did snap a pic of the vineyards up the hill from the village:
I forgot to mention that Veronique said that Lulu is now 99, and V went into the backroom at one point to answer a question from her mother.
One thing I learned on the visit is that there’s quite a difference in the percentage of mourvedre in the three crus. La Miguoa is only 50-65%, while La Tourtine is 70-80% and Cabassaou is 95%. The basic rouge “Cuvée Classique” is 70-75%.
I forgot one other wine discovery: Patrimonio, a small appellation in Corsica.
Most of the hotels and restaurants in Bandol were shut down for the month of January (or more), but Mare & Monte, a Corsican restaurantm was open. They had fantastic charcuterie, which turned out to be made by the (Corsican) proprietor’s father. The olive oil, also superb, was made by a cousin there.
Anyway, we had an excellent meal with a bottle of the Patrimonio, which by law must be 95% nielluccio. The nielluccio is so closely related to sangiovese that some believe it is one and the same. In any event, it was clean, fresh, with good fruit and structure – an excellent match for our lamb and veal chops. It was not unlike a really good unoaked, un-caberneted Chianti. Unfortunately, the wine, Menhir from Domaine Montemagni, doesn’t show up on Wine Searcher in the US. This was 28 euros/$30 or something like that in the restaurant and was very satisfying.
Thanks for the nice notes and travelogue! Somehow I’ve never had a Charvin and it’s on my to-do list this year. A few Berserkers who share my appreciation for VT and Milliere also like Charvin so it seems like it ought to be in a trad style I would like.
Kermit Lynch has a few different Patrimonio wines in his portfolio but they aren’t cheap. I’ve pretty much liked everything I’ve tried over the years but haven’t ever aged anything. Trying to rectify that with some Arena “Carco” from 2012.
I’m not sure why but Charvin’s CdR level wine can be labelled differently between France and the US, although I’m told its all from the same (small) bottling run.
I wish we lived in a world where we could click on a winery, anywhere in the world, and buy whatever they offered, having self driving dogs deliver it to our doorstep. No 3 tiers. No shipping baloney. no mailing lists. or customs. or signature required. So many wines that get discussed on WB are just Unobtainium.
A quick question about the Tempier Rose - are you sure it gets 24 hours of skin time? That’s quite a bit, and would tend to produce a much darker rose than they end up producing.
That’s what Veronique Peyraud said. She stressed that she’s not involved in the winemaking, though.
From the description on the website (though not entirely clear), it sounds like it’s a 24-hour cold soak. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d guess that extracts less color than 24 hours of fermentation on the skins:
After full destemming the grapes are pressed to obtain their juice and cold maceration is performed to extract the fruit aromas and achieve the desired pale colour. Vat bleeding techniques are rarely used. The wine is then vinified by the traditional method used for making white wine, with careful temperature control. The rosé is stored in concrete vats for 8 months before bottling.
Here’s a picture of the wine. I wasn’t quite right to say there was almost no hint of color. In the dim light of the tasting room, it looked pretty much like a white. Looking now at the 2015 I brought home, it’s pretty much like this photo:
