Chateau de Saint Cosme

100% Serine (Syrah) Soil : Schistes Aged for 15 months in new oak (70%) and one-year old barrels (30%) With this Cote Rotie 2009 coming, it looks like the 2007 is back ! How similar ! We find everything we like in a Côte Rôtie : freshness, balance, serine’s relief, the deep and complex aromas which allies finesse and purity of the fruit. The strength and the terroir are easy to understand, simply because it is obviously nice. The colour (blood) is characteristic, the tannins are feminine, the...

Being a winegrower implies searching for, and perfecting, ways of maximising sense of place in one’s wines over an entire lifetime. Each location creates a kind of ‘technical pathway’. Each decision by a winegrower is like a crossroads where he or she can take the right, or the wrong, direction. There are no shortcuts and, generally speaking, when the wrong decision is made, it is hard to make amends. So, finding the right path for each location involves searching for a site’s ‘solution’, like...

Many years before arriving in Gigondas, my father was able to discover wine in general and the wines of our region in particular by tasting Châteauneuf-du-Pape. In fact, his parents’ friendship with the Avrils and family ties with the Quiots quite naturally led to fine bottles of Châteauneuf being placed on the Sunday dinner table. It is an ironic story – 25 years later, my father would become an administrator of the Gigondas producers’ organisation, a member of François Ay’s team who would...