Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Sand and stone, and the mistral.
Châteauneuf is famous for its galets roulés, the rounded quartzite stones the Rhône carried down from the Alps and left in thick layers of red, iron-rich clay on the old river terraces: Mont-Redon and Cabrières to the north-west, La Crau to the south-east. But that is only one of its grounds. There is also fine Miocene sand and the soft sandstone under it called safre, almost free of stone; there is limestone; and there is red clay, which the geologist Georges Truc thinks matters at least as much as the stones.
The stones and the sand make different wines from the same grapes. On the galets, which growers say store the day's heat and give it back at night, Grenache comes out broad and powerful. On sand it comes out perfumed, with fine, silky tannin. Our two growers sit on either side of that line. Font du Loup's vines are on fine sand on the north-facing flank of La Crau, below the stony top. Durieu's Lucile Avril comes mostly from old Grenache on the galets of the Plateau de Farguerol, in the north of the appellation.
Then the mistral. Cold, dry air pours down the Rhône corridor from the north: about 39 days a year of strong mistral at Avignon. It dries the vines within days of rain, keeps disease down, which makes organic farming easier here, and concentrates the berries late in the season. Across the river, Lirac shares the same stones and the same wind.
Curve shapes are illustrative; the size of each swing is from published figures.
Drawn to suggest the ground, not to scale: Font du Loup from the estate and its importers; Farguerol from Durieu's retailers; formations from the appellation's own soil map.
Every producer on this plate
Pick a producer to light up their vineyards and see where each wine comes from.
How the ground is shown: the colours follow what the growers and the appellation publish for each place, not a parcel-by-parcel survey. The mistral lines show its general path down the valley, not a forecast.
Heights marked as the grower's figure come from our producer notes; others are read off the elevation data at the pin. Soil notes come from the producers' technical sheets.
Sources: elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles (public data); soils from the Châteauneuf-du-Pape federation's soil map, Georges Truc via Decanter, the growers and their importers; mistral counts from CIRAME via Andrew Jefford in Decanter.