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About the Wine
We’re happy to welcome Briand back to the list, a perfectly nourishing, Ardéchoise expression of Grenache. In keeping with the vintage, 2023 sees an abundance of blackcurrant fruit right upfront, giving way to those typically herb-flecked liquorice notes, fennel and clove.
Continuing the run of form of wines from this year, and their propensity for youthful drinking, this feels like the best it has tasted so soon after bottling in as long as we can remember. To us it is in many ways the perfect bistro wine – affordable enough to put on the table without to much fanfare, yet quietly overperforming and drinking well with just about anything you care to pair it with. A bottle to reach for time and again.
As with all of Gerald’s red wines, the grapes go into tank as whole bunches to go through carbonic maceration, then are gently pressed ten days later. After a relatively short rest, the wine was then bottled in April 2024 with strictly no additions at any stage.
About Le Mazel
Gérald Oustric is one of a certain generation of winemakers whom experienced a shared epiphany after meeting with Marcel Lapierre during the 80s. At the time he was working the family vineyards in Valvignères, a village in the south of the Ardèche, alongside his father. Each vintage all of the fruit was sold to the local co-operative. It was after this fateful meeting with Lapierre that Gerald realised there was another way to tend the vines and turn the resulting grapes into wine, and by the late 90s he had pulled out of the co-op, converted the domaine to certified organic and, in the wake of the infamous ‘gang of four’ that had inspired him, began to realise his vision of making wine with no additions at all. He joined forces with his sister Jocelyne, and Le Mazel was born.
Over 20 years later they now farm 19 hectares, with a portion leased out to any number of the other emergent winemakers in the region. Gérald is well-regarded for being the guiding force in helping many of these younger producers get set up by selling them grapes, loaning out vineyards, lending them equipment or letting them make their wine in his cellars. There is a healthy, collaborative spirit in the air around these parts but, ever-humble, Gérald's work is often seen after the likes of Anders Frederik Steen, Sylvain Bock, Daniel Sage and Andrea Calek, all of whom he has lent a helping hand to along the way.
The wines themselves are vital, wild-edged and nourishing, and clearly speak of the mistral-swept valley from which they hail. Mazel are notorious for embracing the annual variations that can occur when making wine without heavy manipulations or additions, and as such his staple of regular cuvées can express themselves completely differently from year to year. Each vintage is a new part of a bigger story.