Pedres Blanques Rouge VDF 2019

• Location: Collioure, Côtes Catalanes
• Size: 3.5 ha (8.65 ac)
• Variety: Grenache
• Viticulture: Organic (in conversion)
• Vinification: 100% whole cluster, indigenous yeasts, no pumping, no sulfur added, unfined, unfiltered

Rié and Hiro are Japanese but they met at the wine school in Beaune. She went on to work for Fred Mugnier, among others; he, for five years at Domaine de Chassorney. They are passionate about vineyard work. So, when it came time to make their own wine, they had to look outside Burgundy for affordable vineyards. They tried with no luck in the north. Eventually, they found Collioure, and a retiring vigneron who sold them his vines.

The couple’s first vintage consists of one wine, a Grenache grown on schist. It is vinified and aged in Banyuls in a facility they share with 9 other winemakers. It has a beautiful, whole cluster, floral and clove nose, and it’s not ‘first degree.’ You keep on coming back and back and back, for umami, for tapenade, for black and blue fruit. On the palate the fruit is both rich —with that southern, candied Grenache— and surprisingly buoyant. Where the wine departs from your usual vin de soif is with structure. Though this is an infused and unsulfured wine, with all the silkiness that comes from that, there is also verticality. Not old-school structure, mind you, but simply reminiscent of the vines: clinging to that schist with a mix of great will and fragility.