For my dad's 70th birthday I talked about taking him to Chablis as a treat for a long weekend. This soon turned into a week in the South of France with my brother joining us.
As we flew into Bezier the vines were all over the countryside, standing up like soldiers in their regimented lines. We started off pointing out everyone we saw, but it soon became clear that wouldn't be possible. There were just far too many!
We stayed in a tiny village called Berlou. No shops and one restaurant that opens of an evening 5 days per week. This was the spot for our first tasting.
The appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) is St Chinian in this area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Chinian_AOC
La Grange Leon was a very small producer, with just 27,000 bottles a year. We tried all the wines from pink through to red and enjoyed all of them. Each of us had their favourites - mine was the L'Audacieux 2013, a blend of Carignan (40%), Syrah (35%), and Grenache (25%).
All of the wines were very reasonable price wise and we ended up getting 12 bottles to drink throughout the week.
There were kids, dogs and tractors a plenty and it felt very much like a family business that was buzzing during harvest time. The pickers also rocked up near the end of our time there with dogs etc. Interestingly they all had a beer after they had finished for the day!
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| Don't waste the beautiful grapes! |
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| mulch |
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| Try these bad boys for size |
The wine maker showed us out the back to where they were doing the first press and loading up the grapes onto an escalator that I called the 'Stairway to Grape Heaven'.
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| Beautiful grapes |
You can find our more about the maker here: http://www.saint-chinian.pro/,us,3,85.cfm
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