Domaine Santa Duc, Famille Gras, Les Vielles Vignes, Cotes du Rhone

This is a beautiful Rhone red made by a very established and well-respected domain. It's a fresh, vibrant and juicy red that has fruit at the forefront with acidity and body in perfect balance, making it very difficult to refuse! An excellent pairing for grills, cheeses and meats and hearty casseroles, it's a wine that should become a firm friend.

Organic and in bio-dynamic conversion, this is an estate that is on the cusp of being "too big" to be taken seriously.. but try the wines! They are beautiful and are all exceptionally fine with food, from this lowly Cotes du Rhone to their top-most Cru single vineyards.

What's really interesting about this wine is that it's technically a Cotes du Rhone Villages, as it comes from Gigondas, Vacqueyras, Rasteau, Seguret, and Rouaix. So what you get is excellent quality at a snip of the price. They are careful to maintain the standard though and as such, technically, reserve the right to make it from other vineyard areas that are not Village-level, so that's why they don't bother with the higher level. This mean that they have very consistent standards, and make the wine from a blend that is routinely 60% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 10% Mourvèdre, and a sort of field blend of Cinsault, Counoise and Carignan. As the domaine has vines with the average vine age of 50 years, you can imagine that there are wonderfully high-quality consistency levels, not to mention concentration.

This wine is made by fully destemming the grapes before a long, slow maceration, no oak-aging influence and is bottled without any filtration. The result is this full, fruit-focused wine with ripe, sweet cherry, prune, spice, warm-earth and wild herb flavours.

The low intervention philosophy in the winery result in a fascinating process with long gentle pump-overs, fermentation in stainless steel tanks and only a short ageing in large oak vats with no influence of wood, preserving fruit freshness and liveliness.

The age and experiences in the vineyards, which they have managed since the 19th-Century, form the wine-making and vineyard management know-how that they have accumulated;  their knowledge, wisdom and calm approach at a seemingly evolutionary pace, leads you to appreciate that their quality is not only unsurprising, but also well-set for the future.