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. Find out more.
About the Wine
Ripe and textural with layers of stone fruits, savoury herbs and a bright mineral backbone from the limestone. Honeyed and nectar-like, with rich aromatics of bay, chamomile, melon and pear. There is an oily, mouth-coating quality with some great attack and verve as the wine passes through into a lovely electric oyster shell salinity in the finish. A nourishing country wine with plenty of Mazel soul.
The return of an old cuvée - Les Lèches was originally made using a parcel of vines that Gérald sold to neighbouring vigneron Sylvain Bock when he started out. Having planted more Grenache Blanc that has come to maturity, the wine was reborn in 2023. Roughly half of this young fruit and half Sauvignon Blanc, minus the textbook tasting notes of that varietal.
The grapes are slowly pressed into steel for the juice to co-ferment. As opposed to the long, slow 24-month process of past vintages, the fermentation was fast and had completed by the spring, so Gérald elected to bottle with no additions in April 2025 - something he is experimenting with more frequently as the behaviour of the yeasts appears to be changing along with the climate of the south.
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.
