About this WINE
Domaine Francois Villard
François Villard has grown his tiny wine domaine from four to seven hectares and still produces a miniscule amount of highly allocated bottlings. Referred to by Robert Parker as one of the “stars” of the Northern Rhone, François also acquired a small parcel in Cote-Rotie and a few hectares in St. Joseph. Formerly a chef, François brings his complex palette to the winery to produce wines of power and grace that age for years.
The terroir of the Northern Rhone is, in a word, amazing. Fully exposed hillsides that face the East are covered with terraces first created by the Romans. The soil is made up of small gravel and decomposed schist over a bedrock of granite. The exposition allows for excellent ripening of the Viognier and Syrah grown on these coteaux and for exceptional water drainage (So much so that terraces are always needing to be re- paired.) The climate is warm with much cooler night than those found in the South.
François Villard’s strategy is to allow for the most optimal ripening possible. His wines, as a result, are rich and concentrated with complex aromas of peaches, apricots, honeysuckle, and honey for the whites and leather and spice for the reds. The whites are often allowed to develop botrytis and most of the wines pass through wood ageing for an extended amount of time to prepare them for a very long life in bottle.
The absurdly steep hillsides of the Northern Rhone mean that harvesting by hand is the only option open to winemakers. François Villard and his crew harvest in very small baskets along extremely narrow terraces, making for backbreaking and danger- ous work. These baskets are then emptied into larger boxes to be taken down the hill- sides by tractors, and in some cases, donkeys. The results, however, are unrivaled
Condrieu
Until you’ve tasted Viognier grown in Condrieu, you’ve never truly experienced the grape’s majesty. In the same way that winemakers the world over have planted Pinot Noir in the hope of emulating red Burgundy, so too they’ve planted Viognier in the hope of achieving the unique balance of exotic perfume, weight and freshness for which Condrieu is famed. Few succeed. Traditionally, winemakers here have used relatively inert, large wooden vessels vinification and élevage are in relatively inert, large, wooden vessels, but the new generation of winemakers are increasingly interested in the qualities of new oak.
Plantings have expanded beyond the core of the AOC, around the village itself, to 140 hectares from the low of eight hectares in the 1960s. The vineyards pick up where Côte-Rôtie leaves off, the slope continues, but the schist of the north begins to give way to a little more granite and a topsoil of decomposed mica. Today the appellation is characterised by energy and creativity, and demand for the wines from this diminutive region is soaring.
Viognier
A white grape variety originating in the Northern Rhône and which in the last ten years has been increasingly planted in the Southern Rhône and the Languedoc.
It is a poor-yielding grape that is notoriously fickle to grow, being susceptible to a whole gamut of pests and diseases. Crucially it must be picked at optimum ripeness - if harvested too early and under-ripe the resulting wine can be thin, dilute and unbalanced, while if picked too late then the wine will lack the grape's distinctive peach and honeysuckle aroma. It is most successfully grown in the tiny appellations of Château-Grillet and Condrieu where it thrives on the distinctive arzelle granite-rich soils. It is also grown in Côte Rôtie where it lends aromatic richness to the wines when blended with Syrah.
Viognier has been on the charge in the Southern Rhône and the Languedoc throughout the 1990s and is now a key component of many white Côtes du Rhône. In Languedoc and Rousillon it is increasingly being bottled unblended and with notable success with richly fragrant wines redolent of overripe apricots and peaches and selling at a fraction of the price of their Northern Rhône cousins.
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Description
The east-facing vineyards above St Pierre de Boeuf add angular charm, if you will pardon the oxymoron, to this cuvée, one of the more restrained pupils in the normally exuberant class of Condrieu. Thirty percent new barriques have been used, which will allow the wine to evolve nicely over 18 months. Its natural weight will prove an ideal match for white meats or the fruits of the sea. Drink now to 2016.
Simon Field MW - Rhône Buyer
Irrepressibly cheerful as ever, François Villard shrugs at the 30 to 40 percent drop in yields in 2013, attributing the phenomenon to nature’s way of evening things out, a truism with which it is hard to argue. The slightly higher than normal levels of malic acid he sees as more relevant in terms of potential quality; once the malolactic fermentations were completed however, this problem redressed itself and wines of equilibrium and charm resulted. All things balance out in the end, it seems.
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