Les Sabots d'Hélène, "Jajaculateur Précoce" 2021

A profile from an old wine share once began: “Sculpted by the famous Tramontane wine, where the Eastern-facing foothills of the Corbières Mountains run astride the Mediterranean in a sierra replete with garrigue and scrub, dotted by white rockrose, once represented a kind of dream to Carolin & Nikolaus Bantlin.” It’s a testament to the majesty of the setting that this exact same sentence could open this particular profile of Alban Michel, working not far from the Bantlins in here, the Maritime Corbières of France’s deep South. More specifically, Alban Michel operates out of the hamlet of Feuilla though he is also originally from somewhere much farther north. A native of Baccarat – a city in Northeast France’s Lorraine region – Michel grew up in the forested foothills & valleys associated with the Vosges Mountain range (what otherwist delimits Alsace to the West). After many careers throughout the seeming whole of France, Alban Michel settled into a small 5-hectare operation in Feuilla around 2005. Ever since, it’s been improvement upon improvement for this winegrower who operates in the lowest-interventionist style possible – he proudly calls himself a ‘pifculteur,’ as in somehow who ‘cultivates’ ‘pif’ which is French slang for simple, everyday wine. Having never utilized any sulfites at any point in his winemaking career, he is a talented, vastly experienced sans soufre winegrower ergo the wild-yet-not-ragged aspect of his otherwise epically vibrant bottlings of Syrah, Carignan, Grenache, & Cinsault for the reds, Macabeu, Muscat Petits Grains, Grenaches Blanc & Gris for the non-reds.

Languedoc-Roussillon. A bottling of mostly Grenache, fermented whole cluster in stainless. Unfined, unfiltered, no SO2. A red for the party! As the winemaker says: "I have no certainty of what will become of this wine in 6 months to a year. But it is unlikely to be better than today." Hear, hear.