FRENCH WINE, LIBERATED.
We have no château. No vineyard. Not even a particularly impressive gate.
What we do have is a lot of winemaking talent, an unhealthy obsession with good grapes, and a very good nose for where to find them.
French wine has traditionally been a matter of place. A vineyard. A village. A few hectares of land. And a set of rules telling you exactly what you’re allowed to do with them. This made perfect sense when grapes had to stay close to home: try transporting freshly picked grapes halfway across France a few hundred years ago and you’d mostly be delivering an expensive truckload of rotting grape soup.
Things have changed.
Grapes can travel. Winemakers can travel. Ideas can travel. You only have to look at craft beer to see what happens when people stop asking whether something has always been done that way. And yet the appellation system remains remarkably committed to staying exactly where it was.
The way we see it, great wine is less about obeying geography and more about understanding what each grape can do. And there is one grape, the Pinot Noir, that can do a lot!
So we went looking for the best Pinot Noir grapes we could find, wherever in France they happened to be hiding. Then we brought them together. We take the generous, velvety texture of Pinot Noir from warmer southern vineyards and balance it with the bright acidity and structure of grapes from cooler northern sites.
The result is a Pinot Noir with bright structure and velvety texture that refuses to be told it has to belong to one particular hill: French wine, liberated from the pen-pushers and finger-waggers.
If you’d like to know when the next batch escapes, sign up.
And if you happen to find a cat along the way, let us know.