Cyril Fhal's Hors Champs, Femme soleil is Grenache Gris; Yellow fruit and elegant mineral notes. On the palate it stand out for its purity, freshness and tension.
Direct press, spent 9 months on lees in large wooden vats. Bottled unfined, unfiltered with no additional SO2.
CYRIL FHAL, CLOS DU ROUGE GORGE, Latour-de-France
Biodynamic, Natural
The wines of the Clos du Rouge Gorge are elegant, balanced and full of character, perhaps the finest from the new generation of wine-makers in the Languedoc-Roussillon. They are products of living soils, uniquely beautiful with pure silky fruit, moderate levels of alcohol and firm acidity - delicious examples of the indigenous grapes of the Roussillon.
Cyril Fhal came to the Roussillon from the Loire Valley and found small parcels of north-facing hillside vineyards on gneiss, near the village of Latour-de-France, about 20 miles north-west of Perpignan, with the soil, exposure and altitude of the vines giving freshness and minerality to the wines.
The vines have been tended in biodynamic farming from the beginning, with light plowing by hand, horse or rototiller. Natural composts and biodynamic treatments have revitalized the soil, and plants and flowers among the vines bring beneficial insects and a diverse fauna - the mountainside vineyards have a magical quality and seem to blend in with the surrounding sparse vegetation.
Cyril rejected the AOC regulations of the Roussillon, which require 30% Syrah or Mourvedre, not indigenous to the region, "which by their excess of maturity and lack of acidity in this climate, result in fat and heavy wines," thus his reds from the local Carignan and Grenache are Vins de Pays Cote Catalanes. The local Macabeo for the white is the most apt, according to Cyril, at expressing the mineral character of the soil 'with a certain transparency."
Yields at Clos Rouge Gorge are normally 10 to 20 hl/ha, harvesting is by hand into small baskets, light crushing by foot is followed by slow fermentations (traditional, not carbonic maceration) with no extraction, alcoholic and malo-lactic fermentation in large barrel or foudre.
Hors Champs
Losing half of his crop in 2016 because of drought, and employing four people full-time, Cyril was obliged to bring in some money to make ends meet and with good connections throughout Roussillon, he decided to source fruit from growers working organically in neighbouring villages, insisting on sending in his own team to pick the grapes at a time of his choosing. There is some exceptional fruit grown locally by growers who are more used to turning this into VDN, and launching a project called Hors Champs with his right-hand woman Alice Gendron, Cyril managed to extract some of their grapes to make very different, nuanced, terroir-driven wines with alcohol close to 12%.
The production is limited to around 4,000 bottles of both whites and reds, from which we have bought the two principal cuvées, La Femme Soleil, a maccabeu from 70yo vines grown on schist in Montner, and Une Vie La Nuit, a syrah grown in the highest altitude vineyards in Roussillon, at 600m on the slopes of Montalba and Trevillac.