We are nothing if not persistent. Sure we sold a bit of this in an email a while back but nowhere near what we should have. Here’s a $40 wine that was compared to one of the icons of California wine, SQN, which folks are lined up to throw $300-400 bottle at. Yes we get the whole ‘I got something that you don’t have thing’, but the math is pretty convincing when you can get a wine that carried a 96 point tout, and you could buy 5-7 bottles for what you’d pay for a single bottle of SQN, provided you even got the chance to buy that one bottle at all! L’Ou is a fantastic bottle of Syrah for the fare and we though it definitely deserved another mention. Here is a streamlined (sort of) version of the original piece…
“…We started promoting what we affectionately call ‘the Sud’ (French for ‘south’) about a quarter century ago, though admittedly a lot of the area’s potential ‘thunder’ was stolen by the Rhone which had an unprecedented string of exceptional vintages not long after the ‘Sud’ started breaking on te scene. Even given its long history, when one considers the remoteness, lack of flagship wineries, and association with ‘industrial volume’ production, it probably was predictable that buyers wouldn’t flock to the Sud right away.
Still when people in the region realized they had everything they needed to produce wines that could compete on the world stage. Unique soils, lots of sunshine, mediating influence from the sea, it was a pretty special place to grow grapes. All one had to do was drop a few clusters from the vines so the remaining grapes could be more concentrated and voila.
Séverine and Philippe Bourrier were pretty early to the party that started around the mid-90s. In 1998, they bought the estate of 30 hectares in one piece planted with 26 hectares of vineyards and 4 hectares of olive trees in the town of Montescot in the Pyrénées-Orientales, 10 km south of Perpignan. They immediately converted the entire property to organic farming. At the time, only 3 properties in the Roussillon were practicing organics. In 2009, Séverine and Philippe decided to expand their terroir options by purchasing 8 hectares of vines in Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet and 7 hectares of vines in Caudiès-de-Fenouillèdes.
They are meticulous here. Beside the practicing organics, the grape harvest of Château de L’Ou is exclusively manual and they are specific about picking between sunrise and noon to help the grapes retain freshness. The grapes are harvested into crates of about 10 kg so as not to be damaged during transport and to facilitate handling in the cellar. The date of harvest is determined by tasting a sample of berries with particular attention to the fineness of the skin and seeds.
In our minds it is important for the region to establish a few successful estates to lend credibility to the region. Look what wineries like Booker and Saxum did for Paso Robles. We think the Chateau de L’Ou Secret de Schistes Rouge Cotes Catalanes 2015, an opaque, deeply colored, powerful and pure Syrah, can run with the ‘big dogs’ of the New World, though for all its extraction and presence, it doesn’t sit heavily on the palate. It also has the added bonus of the unique minerality from the black schist soils that are here and in Priorat to the south.
Jeb Dunnuck is making quite a statement in this piece about the Chateau L’Ou, “Saturated black in color, the 2015 IGP Côtes Catalanes Secret de Schistes is reminiscent of Manfred Krankl’s SQN (Sina Qua Non) Syrahs with its deep, unctuous, layered profile. Cassis, chocolate, licorice, smoked herbs and ample minerality all emerge from this full-bodied, sexy beauty that just begs to be drunk. Possessing ripe tannin, a stacked mid-palate and a great finish, it will be better in a year or two and keep for a decade…96 points” – Jeb Dunnuck, Wine Advocate.
We’d make the point that Chateau L’Ou, at $39.98, literally can be had for a fraction of what things like Saxum and Sina Qua Non cost! Enough said.”