Autour de l'Anne, "Les États d'Anne" 2021

Languedoc-Roussillon, France. A blend of Cinsault & Grenache, given a very light maceration with an eye towards freshness & fruit. Fermented with wild yeasts and bottled without SO2. 

It has been nearly 15 years since Anne Paillet's life changed. Having worked in the FiDi of Paris (a neighborhood known as La Defense) for a big industrial corporation for nearly a decade, Anne was one day in the mid-aughts involved in a serious car accident. Thankfully emerging safely from the accident, the event still represented a bizarrely literal kind of non-sequitir that interrupted the record of her life and how she envisioned it; it was this event that served as the sparkplug to quit her corporate life in the city and join her now-husband, Gregory Leclerc in the Loire Valley, in the endeavor of making natural wines! Rather than make wines alongside Gregory, however, in an identical manner, Anne devised a plan to craft fascinating bottles from a different terroir. A friend of Anne's, Christophe Beau, had been a longtime biodynamic grower of some excellent fruit in the South's "Coteaux du Languedoc" appellation -- hatching a business plan in no time, Anne would purchase a portion of Christophe's fruit and truck it north to the Loire where she would vinify the grapes into a 750mL harmony of north meets south. Hand-harvesting her portion of the fruit (2.5 HA of the Beau farm is hers under rent) around the end of August each year, the grapes see a really subtle, beautiful expression and typically light extraction, marrying the fresh ideologies of the Loire with grapes borne out of a much warmer/sunnier clime, in each of her wines.