Vine Path Blog 12/20: A Send Off to 2020

At this point it’s completely redundant and overly obvious to say that 2020 was a rough year unless your name was Jeff Bezos. We’ve all had to contort and adapt ourselves to our new, weird reality of being stuck mostly indoors, not going into the office, not seeing friends and family, and constant mask wearing. The holiday season this year is guaranteed to be weird and different too, with no expectations of raucous New Year’s parties and limited Christmas gatherings. This month’s collection is an exploration of the Rhone Valley of France, and wines that are perfect for the harsh winter days that lie ahead.

We always like to make the December collection special as a way for us to show our appreciation for you, our valued club members, for sticking with us through the year. We love putting these allocations together and getting the opportunity to introduce people to new and exciting bottles and producers. As a special thank you for enduring 2020 and supporting us through it, you’ll also be receiving a bonus gift bottle of R. Dumont et Fils Champagne Brut. We know it doesn’t fit the theme, but everyone can use a little sparkle in their life. Here’s to sending off the weirdest year in recent memory, here’s to hoping for greener pastures in 2021, and here’s to y’all for supporting us and keeping with the club. We hope everyone has a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year!

Fanny Breuil and Thomas Oui

Grappes & Terroirs Ventoux Rouge

Fanny Breuil started her solo winemaking project, Grappes & Terroirs, back in 2010 with her old friend and winemaking colleague Thomas Oui after years of working with winemakers around the southern Rhone. The idea was a simple one, leverage her relationships with exceptional growers around the Rhone to produce organic wines with a minimal interventionist philosophy. Ventoux is an overlooked region in the Rhone Valley. North of Luberon and just south of Cotes du Rhone, Ventoux is not a place well known for exceptional wines. That perception is sure to change soon once oenophiles get a good whiff of these fascinating wines. For this cuvee, Fanny sourced Mourvedre, Grenache, and Syrah from vineyards older than 40 years and vinified the wine in concrete tanks. The resulting wine is dense and richly concentrated without the mask of oak covering anything up.

Francois Tissot

Les Sept Pierres Coteau de l’Ardèche Rouge

Les Sept Pierres is the passion project of a dynamic, young vigneron by the name of Francois Tissot. In 2013 he renovated an old farmhouse, purchased 5 hectares of land in the northern Rhone, and started making some seriously delicious Syrah. Ardeche is in the northernmost part of the Southern Rhone (confusing, I know) and is situated at a relatively high altitude that helps Syrah thrive here. For his Ardeche he hand harvests the grapes and vinifies them in a mixture of steel and oak. Grenache is blended in at around 10% to widen the palate. The resulting wine is deep and powerful with loads of spicy aromatics and meaty undertones.

Gilles Robin in the vineyard.

Gilles Robin ‘Papillon’ Crozes-Hermitage

Right next to the holy hillside of Hermitage is Crozes-Hermitage, one of the most sacred places for Syrah in the whole world. The Robin family has been farming vineyards in this region for at least four generations now, though it wasn’t until the 1940s that the family established its own estate. All the vineyards in the Domaine are managed by hand, harvested by hand, farmed organically, and vinified with little to no intervention. The philosophy of Gilles Robin is a gentle one. For the cuvee ‘Papillon’, young vines in the estate are selected and vinified in stainless steel. The idea behind the cuvee is to make a young and approachable Syrah that still demonstrates why this part of the Rhone is so special. This wine is luxurious and giving, with loads of meaty and spicy aromas along with a dense, chewy black fruit focused palate.

Crozes-Hermitage