2024 La Vie En Rose, Cinq Petales, Cinsault Rose
Regular price £12.29 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 117): Computation results in '-Infinity'%A beautifully, elegant Rose - such a food friendly wine that will have even the hardened sceptics seen the wine through rose tinted specs!
Tasting Notes
La Vie en Rose is a beautifully elegant wine and now it comes with refreshing new packaging to match. Fresh, summery and pale in colour, this dry rosé has hints of summer fruits such as strawberry and wild raspberry and mouth-watering acidity. Food friendly and delicious.

Viticulture
Top category grapes from the Puichéric area from the best qualitative plots and vines averaging 25 years old. 150m above sea level, the vines are protected from wind and receive plenty of sunshine. Grapes mature slowly developing an aromatic profile.
Winemaking
The grapes are selected among the coolest vineyards to ensure good natural acidity. Harvest is during the coolest hours of the day, early morning and the grapes are directly pressed into airbag presses. The juice is cold settled and goes though fermentation at cool temperature for 2 weeks. The wines are then quickly cleared off their gross lees and are kept in stainless steel tanks on fine lees only until bottling, in order to keep maximum fresh fruit and freshness..
Specifications
| Year | 2024 |
| Bottle Size | 750ml |
| Cultivar | Cinsault 100% |
| Country | France |
|
Alcohol content
|
12% alc vol
|
| Units of Alcohol per Bottle | 9 units |
| Type | Rose |
| Cellaring Potential | Awaiting info |
| Allergen Information | Contains Sulphites |
| Dietary Information |
Vegan, Vegetarian
|
| Food Matches | Incredible with salads and chargrilled meats but a versatile wine which partners well with most seafood and meat dishes. |
| Origin | Languedoc |
| Appellation | IGP Pays d'Oc |
2023 Domaine Boutinot Les Cerisiers Rosé, AOP Côtes du Rhône
Regular price £11.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 117): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Determined to craft the finest Côtes du Rhône Rosé, based on varieties naturally suited to this style: Grenache Noir for its body, Cinsault for its freshness, and a hint of spice from a touch of Syrah.
Tasting Notes
An elegant, truly gastronomic rosé from our home in the Rhône. A classic salmon pink rosé with delicate perfumed aromas of rosehip syrup, wild berry blossoms and cherries on the nose. Full flavoured, ripe and beautifully balanced with acidity, there’s elegant, textured, berry fruit on the palate with a twist of raspberry freshness to lift the finish. Deliciously balanced and moreish.

Producer
Boutinot’s love affair with the Southern Rhône spans thirty years of making wine in the region. In 2010, the relationship was sealed with the purchase of a winery and vineyards above the village of Cairanne. Domaine Boutinot’s seven vineyards are planted with classic southern Rhône grape varieties – old vine Grenache Noir and Syrah, Mourvèdre and Carignan Noir – and they all sit within the Cairanne Cru boundaries, sanctioned in 2016 when Cairanne was granted its own appellation status.
Working with our vigneron neighbours we are helping to revive traditional grape varieties such as Cinsault and Counoise, and in the cellar we prefer time-honoured winemaking methods such as a long cuvasion aided only by natural yeasts, gentle remontage, manual pigeage and patient maturation in a nursery of French oak barrels.
Production
Our hunt for specific plots that would deliver the best grapes with the right balance and flavour profile led us to the south of the Côtes du Rhône where we found ripeness and aroma to balance the freshness found in plots from northern villages of the Southern Rhône valley. As with previous vintages, Les Cerisiers is again made in the same way as the best rosés of Provence, uses the ‘rosé de presse’ method as soon as the grapes are picked. This very gentle pressing extracts as much aroma and flavour as possible with the least amount of tannins. The wine is both pressed and vinified at cool temperatures (of no more than 16Intent ) in stainless steel vats to preserve these delicate aroma, flavours and colour.
Sustainability
In July 2021 Domaine Boutinot Rhône achieved the Haute Valeur Environnementale (HVE 3) certification This certification recognises a high level of commitment to protecting and enriching the environment with the focus on biodiversity conservation, plant protection strategy, management of fertiliser use and management of water.
Specifications
| Year | 2023 |
| Bottle Size | 750ml |
| Cultivar | Grenache Noir 85%, Cinsault 10%, Syrah 5% |
| Country | France |
|
Alcohol content
|
13% alc vol
|
| Units of Alcohol per Bottle | 9.75 units |
| Type | Rose |
| Cellaring Potential | Awaiting info |
| Allergen Information | Contains Sulphites |
| Dietary Information |
Vegan, Vegetarian, Sustainable
|
| Food Matches | As with rosé from neighbouring Provence, Les Cerisiers should not be seen only as a delicious apéritif but a match for light dishes - a simple charcuterie plate or grilled salmon and prawns. It also pairs well with more complex dishes; Bouillabaisse, the classic southern French fish stew, or even Red Thai Chicken Curry, a spicy bean tagine or a mushroom and aubergine lasagne. |
| Origin | Rhône |
| Appellation | Côtes du Rhône Villages |
2024 Eric Texier Chat Fou
Regular price £21.79 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 117): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Production
All fruit is organic, harvested by hand, partly de-stemmed and co-fermented with native yeasts in open-top concrete tanks. As with all Texier wines, no extraction techniques are employed, aged in concrete for 12-18 months, unfined, unfiltered and bottled with only the smallest amount of sulphur.
Producer
Despite having no experience or contacts in wine, Eric decided to give up his career as a nuclear engineer and study winemaking in 1992, interning with Jean-Marie Guffens at Verget in Mâcon. Lacking the network to buy his own vineyard, Eric did his time with established winemakers then made négoce wines with the fruit of like-minded purists until he was introduced to François Pouchoulin, AKA the Godfather of Brézème. Eric was fascinated by the history of this tiny enclave on the southernmost edge of the Northern Rhone, on the left bank of the Rhone. It is South facing, has limestone-rich clay soils and, at 300 meters of elevation has an increasingly steep aspect with terrain that grows rockier as the slope rises. In the mid-19th century, its wines rivalled those of Hermitage but, by 1961, just one hectare remained. Thanks to Pouchoulin’s help and guidance, Texier eventually succeeded in purchasing a tiny parcel of vines in Brézème. Many years later, Éric has now put the Brézème appellation back on the map, and is the leading grower there. After Brézème, Eric and his wife Laurence (the backbone of their business-they are very much a team and travel everywhere together) purchased another tiny plot, this time in the Ouvèze valley in the Ardèche, on the right bank of the Rhone. This site has granite soils, is at a higher altitude than Brézème and has higher growing temperatures. According to Eric, both of these classic Northern Rhone plots had almost been forgotten because of their isolated geographic position and small surface areas. Today, Eric and Laurence have 12 hectares under vine, with vines aged from 30 to 90 years old on both sides of the Rhone, all worked organically. This is not a sudden conversion or a response to trend, Eric has worked organically since the beginning. As for biodynamics, he follows some of its principles but is not dogmatic about it.
Specifications
| Year | 2024 |
| Bottle Size | 750ml |
| Cultivar | 55% Grenache, 30% Cinsault, 15% others |
| Country | France |
|
Alcohol content
|
12.5% ABV |
| Units of alcohol per bottle | 9.4 units |
| Type | Red Wine |
| Allergen Information | Contains Sulphites |
| Dietary Information | Vegan & Vegetarian Approved, Organic |
| Food Matches | A playful wine which should be enjoyed with delicious food; pair with Mediterranean style mezze, grilled lamb, roast aubergines and good company. |
| Appellation | Vin de France, Northern Rhone |
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2022 Percheron Old Vine Cinsault
Regular price £9.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 117): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Tasting Notes
Nose
Crushed for flavour not colour, this 40 year old unirrigated bush vine wine sucks only from the rocks underground. Bright, expressive and gently savoury on the nose.
Palate
Along with its blushing hue, the palate rewards with fresh pomegranate flavour and acidity, savoury gamey notes, and a bright, beating heart of cherry ripe fruit. Slightly chilled with pink duck, pink lamb or carpaccio of beef, this is a beautifully defined expression of South Africa’s most achingly fashionable varietal.
Production
No irrigation is used on the vineyards and very little crop control is needed due to the age of the vines naturally restricting yield. All grapes are harvested by hand. Cinsault has bewilderingly been overlooked for so long in the Cape but is a grape variety we have proudly been championing for years - so it's great that this voice of the Cape's cool Atlantic vineyards is finally finding favour with wine drinkers.
The vines are mostly 40-year-old bush vines from hidden corners of the Cape. No irrigation is used on the vineyards and very little crop control is needed due to the age of the vines naturally restricted yield. The climate is perfect for viticulture with the low rainfall in summer months, tempered by cool afternoon breezes and the cold winters allowing the vines to rest and to build up reserves. All grapes are picked by hand at optimal phenolic ripeness, followed by a fermentation using delestage in which the juice is oxygenated which brings a lower concentration of tannins and a higher concentration of esters, key compounds that contribute fruitiness. The result is a wine, in which red fruit dominates full off and which is full of juiciness.
Producer
Boutinot South Africa is driven by our passion for discovery and desire to capture the real essence of South Africa in every bottle. It was the simple love of Loire Chenin Blanc that first led us to South Africa in 1994, where we pioneered the wild ferment style that has now been adopted by many producers in this region.
Since then we have been exploring the country's amazing vineyards to make fabulous wines from specific sites and plots that scream location, location, terroir.. Our home-grown South African winemaking team of JD Rossouw and Ryno Booysen drive the energy and enthuasiam for expressing the loveliest wines from their country, along with Samantha Bailey's expertise in finesse. The key is knowing the characteristics of each plot, understanding the benefits each cultivar can bring, breaking rules and pushing boundaries. We use a combination of knowledge, a love of nature and science to create versatile, expressive and food-friendly wines from a country that has been making wine for 360 years.
Alan's Personal Tasting Notes
"We sell a lot of this and I know why! Medium bodied with bright, crunchy, cherry fruit, a touch of spice and a lovely savoury finish - an absolutely fabulous mouthful at under a tenner a bottle! Tasted June 2024
Specifications
| Year | 2022 |
| Bottle Size | 750ml |
| Cultivar | 100% Cinsault |
| Country | South Africa |
|
Alcohol content
|
13% alc vol
|
| Units of Alcohol per Bottle | 9.8 units |
| Type | Red Wine |
| Cellaring Potential | Awaiting info |
| Features | Vegetarian & Vegan |
| Allergen Information | Contains sulphites |
| Food Matches | Delicious slightly chilled, this Cinsault's bright, earthy notes and acidity marries beautifully with Asian duck dishes, pork belly, stir-fried beef and indeed carpaccio of tuna, beef or game. |
| Origin | Western Cape |
| Appellation |
WO Coastal Region
|
