Dom. de Fenouillet Cotes du Ventoux

The Landscape... We drove to Beaumes de Venise from St. Remy to meet Patrick and Vincent Soard. St. Remy is pleasant, charming even, but a little touristy. Beaumes de Venise isn’t touristy at all. More dusty, in fact, a parched, tiny agricultural enclave known for making the Rhone’s best sweet white wine. My trip predated ubiquitous GPS navigators in rental cars, so the wife and I worked our way north and west to the Soard’s farm along roads that made both driving and daydreaming out the passenger-side window memorably great experiences. Plane trees, ancient Provencal villages, broken monoliths jutting into the sky. Getting to and from Domaine de Fenouillet was worth the whole price of a holiday.

The Estate... All the fruit is hand harvested here. The estate covers 16 hectares. Fenouillet is a form of fennel. The estate has significant plantings of old vines. In the late 1980s the Soard brothers returned their family winery to estate-bottling after generations of selling fruit to the local cooperative.

The Brothers... It was a hot dry day in the middle of France’s hottest summer in centuries, and the cool of the winery and the prospect of venturing back out under the enormous sun made cellar-temperature reds and whites even more appealing. We drank 10-year-old dry Muscat, a wine that lingered in the memory for months afterward. We ended our rosy visit discussing the American political landscape. I felt really welcomed by these guys. It seemed like we tasted all of their wines, upcoming releases from cuve and barrel (barrels are mostly used to make the Cuvée Yvon Soard red, an old-vine homage to their father) and then moved from the cave to the tasting room/storefront for glasses of their fruit juice. I think it was apricot. I remember wanting to haul bottles back to the states. I knew we’d carry their wines at my store, so it would be pointless to fill the suitcase with those, but I can’t imagine the juice leaves town. Another reason to return one day. Maybe crossing the ocean for a non-alcoholic beverage is too much, but bottled juice can be so insultingly bad here. I’ll see what my juicer can do with apricots this summer.