I am aware of publishing posts all too rarely this year. I don’t post unless I have something to say which I feel may be worthy of your time though you may argue that the quality assurance fails sometimes! The vast majority of posts are about my time working alongside Jeff Coutelou and relating what is happening at his Puimisson domaine. Indeed this is the first year I can recall when I will have spent not one minute in France. Restrictions around COVID-19 made it impossible to spend time with him in 2020 so I have posted updates from Jeff as well as more general posts.

So, what news from the Languedoc? After vendanges the wines complete fermentation and settle in the various tanks for 2-3 months before Jeff makes final decisions about what to do with each of them. The large cement tanks are filled with one grape variety and often from one vineyard, e.g. Syrah from Sainte Suzanne is separate from Syrah of Peilhan. Though Jeff makes some wines from one grape, known as monocépage (5SO Simple for example), he is best known for his wines made from different varieties, Classe, Le Vin Des Amis being the best known.

In order to give these blended wines (assemblages) time to truly mix and marry their flavours and textures it is usually in November that Jeff will make the decisions about what to blend. Last week was the right time, fermentations completed, wines maturing. Thierry, his analyst, joined Jeff to try different blendings. They tasted the various wines, then mix together the typical assemblages for the wines, Classe for example will contain Grenache and Syrah. So they tried different percentages mixed and then judge whether the wine would benefit from another component, perhaps some Cinsault for freshness or some Mourvedre for body. Having played around with various blends they agreed upon the final blend.

Some wines will remain in tank, a new blend of those might be put together or they may be used for a small amount of single variety wine. I have been involved in these tastings and though it is fun it is also very important and serious as the decision is final, once the wines are put together there is no going back. Get it wrong and the customer may not like the wine. From there, of course, Jeff will have to physically move the wines, thousands of litres at a time from one tank to another and make the assemblage. There they will settle over winter and spring ready for bottling at some point next year. 2020 wines, a good harvest, promising well for a year which needs something to rescue it.

Meanwhile the wines of 2019 which were delayed by slow fermentations have reached the market. Bottling took place before vendanges in order to free up the tanks for the 2020 wines and during October thousands of bottles were habillées (labelled and capsuled). This is hard work, lots of carrying heavy boxes. It is also repetitive but an opportunity for the team to talk and joke together (as well as sampling the odd bottle, purely for more quality assurance of course). Jeff told me that over 32,000 bottles went out in one week and I acted quickly to snap some up from French suppliers as my usual source has been denied me this year. I noticed that the Coutelou wines remain amongst the cheapest on any website, below 10 euros in some cases. And today when I checked one site had already run out of 5SO Simple. I have opened a couple of the bottles so far but will give a fuller tasting when I have opened all of the different cuvées.

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I will be posting more regularly this month with not just those tasting notes but also with my choices of recent wines and wines of the year. It has been a pleasant surprise to see reading figures actually go up in recent weeks and months, perhaps the less I write the better it is! But thank you.