Wine Details

Jean Gardiés • Les Millères
Côtes du Roussillon Villages
20059088
France • Languedoc • Roussillon
2005
90
Jeff Tolmie - 03.07.2008
Bright dark purple red with noticable legs. The nose is full of well ripened fruity notes of dark cherry and licorice. The palate is full bodied with strong tannins, rich fruits and great acids. They all leap out at you the moment they enter your mouth. Finish is medium long and nicely balanced. This is a nice wine, strong and confident. Lacking perhaps in complexity.
88
- www.winewriting.com
attractive ripe black cherry and liquorice fruit with herbal edges, soft and round v fresh dry bite. 03.07.2008
03.07.08
1
11.00
Weinlade Gutenbergplatz
Notes
Alcohol: 13%
Jean Gardiès has come a long way since his first vintage in 1993. The newly built (I visited in April 2007), elegant wooden winery looks stunning lost in the beautiful wild vine-lands above Espira de l'Agly. In common with several leading estates, Gardiès' attention has turned more recently towards planting white varieties, as he believes there's a promising future for high quality Roussillon white wines (I tend to agree by and large). Having said that, most of the estate's 30-35 ha (75 acres) are planted with all the region's usual red suspects (see notes below), and Jean has had particular success with Mourvèdre in this neck of the woods.
He's also mastered how to make really nice dry Muscat - not necessarily a given unless you grow it differently and vinify carefully - and still produces a fair bit of Rivesaltes VDN styles. "These sweet wines are a difficult sell outside of France, which is a pity as it's a unique tradition to the Roussillon." Jean's focus is export, although is happy to meet wine enthusiasts at the winery by appointment, increasingly finding "a knock-on effect: the more Roussillon wines there are out there, the greater the demand. But it's still hard persuading distributors to take on our wines." The domaine is in the process of organic certification, but Jean isn't especially interested in using this as the main thrust. "The wine still has to be good... just like whether it's appellation or vin de pays, you shouldn't need it on the bottle to sell it." Indeed, the proof is in the pudding as that quaintly bizarre English expression has it.
Ref: 512