Allé Canto Sweet Red 2016

Allé Canto Sweet Red 2016

La Sorga

Antony Tortul loves old vineyards: he devotes his life to finding them and making wine from them. Just as there are landless shepherds, he can be defined as a landless winegrower, in other words, a wine merchant whose area of activity extends throughout Languedoc and, eastward, as far as Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in search of the best terroirs. Born in Foix, with six years of experience as a wine technician and oenologist in various vineyards in the south of France, he created La Sorga in 2008. His enthusiasm leads him on a path filled with favorites, and each of these favorites is a vineyard. The result is a dizzying mosaic of natural, lively, and spirited wines, which reinvents itself each year with around thirty cuvées per vintage. Few winemakers can list such a variety of grape varieties on their menu: the whole of southern France is there with muscats, grenaches, picpoul, mauzac, carignan, cinsault, marsanne, alicante, braucol, duras, viognier, len-de-l’el, and all the rest.

This single-varietal wine made from Alicante Bouschet comes from the ferruginous clay-limestone soils of Cessenon-sur-Orb, in the Saint-Chinian appellation area. The vines grow on a very old plot (seventy years old). The late harvest is sorted berry by berry and the vinification is carried out in open amphorae. Maceration takes place for three months, and the wine is aged in demijohns for four years. All this produces a very powerful and aromatic wine, with a kirsch, vegetal and fresh nose, smoky and chocolatey, black olive, which will not leave you indifferent. The palate is full, with very little tannin for an Alicante, and it's hard to get fresher with a late harvest. The wine's ageing is remarkable (more than six months) and the aging potential is a good twenty years.