Domaine Texier Cotes du Rhone Brezeme Rouge, 2020, 750ml

Description

The bouquet of the 2020 delivers scents of cassis, a touch of dark chocolate, pepper, smoked meats, bonfire, chalky soil tones, coffee bean and a smoky topnote. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and beautifully sappy at the core, with lovely soil undertow, fine-grained tannins and a long, complex and seamlessly balanced finish. This is just lovely juice.

100% Syrah. From Texier's younger (20-40-year-old) vines, planted on a south-facing, limestone marl slope of the Brézème zone (on eastern side of the Rhône River at the southern edge of the northern Rhône Valley). They are organically farmed and harvested by hand. The vinification and aging are identical to Texier's St Julien bottling and thus purely expressive of the cooler, less solar, more limestone-rich Brézème terroir: whole-cluster fermentation with native yeasts in open concrete tanks with no sulfur and a 6-8-day maceration; no extraction techniques (only a submerged cap for gentle infusion of color and flavor); aging in concrete tanks on the fine lees for 18-24 months with no racking; bottling is without fining or filtration and with a minute dose of sulfur.