Domaine Petit Oratoire, "T'as poussé le bouchon trop loin!" 2021

Valliguieres is a village of the Gard department in southern France, technically part of the broader geographical tissue of the Rhône. The winemaker Lori Haon, having come down from Alsace where he'd completed his oenology degree in 2016, found a home in this sleepy countryside village blessed with a natural bounty (several protected sites including the L'Etang de Valliguieres are located within the village's limits), among which you might say is the vineyard left to ruin that he found for sale on eBay planted to 20 hectares of vines, including century-old Grenache and Carignan plants. Only in France does this bizarre tale approach anything making sense. Well, when he was the highest bidder, to the victor went the spoils and thus began the years-long work of recovering the vines from near-oblivion and from this toil, a vineyard was revivified. Working quite naturally (many if not all cuvées are zero/zero), the wines retain real freshness and herby bite, typical of the kind of 'garrigue' aromatics you may expect from wines crafted within the broader Rhône. However, they are distinctly of the Gard in that they are plump and fruity yet retain the minerality and hardier acidity one might expect of a wine made in, say, the Ardèche, all the while bespeaking their southerly outfitting with rosemary, herb, mint wrapping the wine into its burlier rusticity in the finish. Wines-of-distinction in their distinctiveness. And in a liter, no less!

Grenache, Syrah, Cinsault and Carignan, fermented whole cluster. Zero/zero.