2018 Cotes du Roussillon Villages Estaca

Full bottle 1,341 g. Unfiltered, unfined, no acidification, no chaptalisation. Spontaneous fermentation. From the oldest vineyard they have in the estate. 100% Grenache, vines over 120 years old. On slate soils, on a hill – a gentle slope. Seb Danjou: ‘It always gives something which has the taste of Estaca. The taste of the earth. Granular. 2018 was very cool, so we wanted to present the wine like this, with not a lot of élevage or bottle ageing. 2018 doesn’t need to be in bottle for a long time, but it is so delicate now that we wanted people to taste it like this. We are trying to do something direct. My first oenological tool is a wine glass, the second is my nose and then my mouth and then my ears.’ Very pale. Very spicy. And very very perfumed. There is an old red rose called Mister Lincoln. It has the deep, velvet, classic perfume of a red rose. This wine smells like Mister Lincoln dusted in cardamom. It tastes of wild cherry, white pepper, pink peppercorns, Szechuan pepper, truffle and, more than anything else, rain on warm slate. Petrichor. Complex, yet almost exquisitely simple. No noise. No posturing. In one sip, you’re in this wild, beautiful vineyard, nothing but the sound of the wind through trees. Pure, transparent, yet so layered-upon-layered that you can read a thousand stories in one sip. A haiku of a wine. (TC)