About this WINE
Domaine Pierre-Jean Villa
Pierre Jean Villa is a talented Rhone winemaker, producing terroir-driven, balanced wines with ample fruit and delightful complexity.
Aside the work at his boutique winery, Pierre Jean Villa has been one of the founding members of the negociant house Les Vins de Vienne since 2003. Villa, together with Francois Villard, Yves Cuilleron, and Pierre Gaillard regenerated a number of very old vineyards in Northern Rhone to produce a range of excellent wines.
Syrah/Shiraz
A noble black grape variety grown particularly in the Northern Rhône where it produces the great red wines of Hermitage, Cote Rôtie and Cornas, and in Australia where it produces wines of startling depth and intensity. Reasonably low yields are a crucial factor for quality as is picking at optimum ripeness. Its heartland, Hermitage and Côte Rôtie, consists of 270 hectares of steeply terraced vineyards producing wines that brim with pepper, spices, tar and black treacle when young. After 5-10 years they become smooth and velvety with pronounced fruit characteristics of damsons, raspberries, blackcurrants and loganberries.
It is now grown extensively in the Southern Rhône where it is blended with Grenache and Mourvèdre to produce the great red wines of Châteauneuf du Pape and Gigondas amongst others. Its spiritual home in Australia is the Barossa Valley, where there are plantings dating as far back as 1860. Australian Shiraz tends to be sweeter than its Northern Rhône counterpart and the best examples are redolent of new leather, dark chocolate, liquorice, and prunes and display a blackcurrant lusciousness.
South African producers such as Eben Sadie are now producing world- class Shiraz wines that represent astonishing value for money.
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Description
The Preface in 2011 seems more elegant and finely-honed than its forebears, maybe the result of reducing the elevage a touch, maybe because the vineyards are perfectly located to benefit from optimal exposure to the sun, always an advantage in vintages such as this. Whatever the reasons, the wine is first class.
Simon Field MW, BBR Buyer
Pierre-Jean’s decade as the régisseur at les Vins de Vienne, taking daily control of winemaking as the eminences grises Gaillard, Cuilleron and Villard supervised from a distance, has clearly rubbed off. His Seyssuel wine is outstanding and fantastically different from the Côte-Rôtie, underlining subtly differing terroir and the fact that the mighty Rhône separates the two enclaves.
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