Domaine Gramenon Cotes du Rhone Ceps Centenaires La Meme 2022

Domaine Gramenon's story carries real weight and quiet tragedy. Philippe Laurent and Michèle Aubéry-Laurent bought twelve hectares of vines and an old barn near Montbrison-sur-Lez in 1978, bottling their first vintage in 1990 and building a reputation for uncompromising, minimal-intervention winemaking. In 1999, Philippe died in a tractor accident, and Michèle — whose seemingly reserved manner, by all accounts, melts the moment she starts talking about her wines — carried the estate forward alone, later joined by their son Maxime François Laurent, who now also makes his own wines at the domaine. La Mémé, named for Michèle's own grandmother, comes from two tiny plots totalling half a hectare of Grenache planted in the 1900s and 1910s — vines now well over a century old, so prized that cuttings from them have been used as massale selections to replace dead vines elsewhere on the property. The wine is whole-bunch fermented in an open wood vat for two to three weeks with daily pump-overs, then aged eight to ten months in old, well-seasoned casks (more recently a mix of demi-muid and concrete egg), bottled unfined, unfiltered, and without any added sulphur — production is tiny, typically just a few thousand bottles a year.