The Sacred Mountain White 2018

La Montagne Sacrée Blanc 2018,

La Sorga

Anthony Tortul loves old vineyards: he devotes his life to finding and vinifying them. Just as there are landless shepherds, he can be defined as a landless winegrower, in other words, a wine merchant whose scope 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 viticultural technician and oenologist in various vineyards in the south of France, he founded La Sorga in 2008. His enthusiasm leads him on a path filled with love at first sight, and each of these loves is a vineyard. The result is a stunning mosaic of natural, lively, and spirited wines, reinvented each year with around thirty cuvées per vintage. Few winemakers can include such a variety of grape varieties on their menu: the whole of southern France is included, with muscats, grenaches, picpoul, mauzac, carignan, cinsault, marsanne, alicante, braucol, duras, viognier, len-de-l’el, and all the rest.
La Montagne sacrée alludes, among other things, to the eponymous film with esoteric connotations directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1974. He was, of course, inspired by the dramatic and spiritual landscapes of the Cabrières mountains (Hérault), from which the grapes come. These basalt peaks and deep valleys express a very special magic. The wine is a white from schist terroir. The grape varieties are eighty percent Grenache Blanc (fifty-year-old vines) and twenty percent Muscat d'Alexandrie (twenty-year-old vines). Vinification is done by maceration ("dip") of whole bunches of Muscat in the Grenache must obtained by direct pressing. The wine is aged on lees in sandstone eggs for eleven months. The nose expresses bergamot, lemon preserved in brine, and candied melon. The complex mineral structure of Grenache appears on the palate, very marked by these exceptional terroirs of high-altitude schists. Very good air resistance.
Natural wine with no added sulfites.