Puritaine

​Winemakers Stephanie & Olivier Ramé, a husband and wife team, are the third generation of their family to run the show at Maison Ventenac. Their vineyards are in Cabardès, the only Languedoc appellation that allows both Atlantic and Mediterranean grape varieties, so offering a unique exploration of flavors. The village is famed for its limestone, chalky soils, which they say gives their wines their saline & fresh characters. The winemaking philosophy is to allow their unique terroir to shine through in the wines, presenting them as naturally as possible and raising in tuns, terra cotta urns and concrete vats to enhance their purity.

This smells like smoked topside with a wild-cherry glaze. On the palate, there is an incredibly fragrant lift of dried basil and pink peppercorns over a concentrated core of black cherries, wild blackberries and elderberries. It has dark bitterness and char, but so tightly woven into the fruit that, like an artist daubs shadow into the light to make a painting come to three dimensional life, these elements make this wine step off the page.