Le Grenache du Bois Saint Jaume Rouge 2020,
Fond Cyprès
Fresh, delicious, supple, intense, balanced, and with a surprising length on the palate, this beautiful red Grenache is perfect for drinking or keeping. Delicate and velvety, it offers beautifully blended tannins and a magnificent balance with notes of undergrowth and garrigue plants. It has the generous and caressing character of its grape variety. This is a good example of Fond Cyprès' "forest" wines, marked not only by their grape varieties but also by the wooded and windy environment that refreshed the grapes' growth. After hand-harvesting, destemming, and four weeks of fermentation in concrete vats, the wine spends ten months aging in old barrels. It comes from a sandy plot of Grenache vines surrounded by a forest and a biodynamic olive grove. It is aged for nine to twelve months in old 228-liter demi-muids, which have the advantage of not oaking the wine but ensuring a comfortable, gentle aging process.
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This Languedoc estate is built on solid foundations: its two winemakers, Rodolphe and Laetitia, are also descendants of winemakers. Even before planting their first vine, they already had a clear objective: "to produce southern wines that reflect us, wines with character, attached to our soils, with freshness and refined tannins." They want to obtain entirely natural wines, concentrates of terroir. In the old Corbières massif, they are taking over an old heart of the estate already planted with abandoned Carignan and Grenache, which have seen neither fertilizer nor pesticides for years: these clean, living soils are an ideal condition for launching into natural wine. Around this historic heart, they first planted Grenache Noir and Syrah, then a plot of white grape varieties: Viognier, Grenache Blanc, Roussanne. The estate has been Ecocert certified since 2010 and also complies with the Nature & Progrès charter. The vinification is done without the addition of sulfites or exogenous yeasts. "We make wines for pleasure," say Laetitia and Rodolphe. For them, natural wine is first assessed by taste, from the harvest. The vintages closely follow the plots, the musts are fruity, fluid, and complex. The wines of Fond Cyprès poetically evoke the estate's ecosystem and the vegetation that protects the plots: the pine forests, the shady springs, the beauty of the natural environment that brings freshness to the wines and leaves the soil's signature. Deliciously balanced between mineral imprint, vegetal environment and expression of fruit, the wines of Fond Cyprès reflect the South: the caress of its sun, but also the freshness of its shadows.