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Times are changing for wine. The days when the focus was on 'blockbuster', super-ripe, jammy reds with lots of alcohol and vanilla oak that wowed some American critics, are over. Today, the focus is increasingly on wines that are lighter, fresher and more compatible with a wide range of dishes.
After some experimentation, we decided to use Grenache and Cinsault - two grapes that are crucial to our roses - from specific vineyards that benefit from both sun and a range of cooling winds, and to vinify them in quite different ways.
The Grenache, from plots close to the village of Pepieux was fermented and left to macerate for 36 hours which allowed more colour to be extracted from the skins than we would get if we were making pink wine, but less than for red.
For the Cinsault from Azille, another village to the southwest of Pepieux, we came up with our own version of a winemaking trick the Italians have been using for millennia: we took freshly fermented wine that would otherwise have become rose, and left it for 12 hours in contact with the skins of black grapes that had been used to make red wine. This gave us the colour we wanted and some of that tannic structure.
Leger, the latest member of our flock of black sheep, is fresh and full of summery flavours that bring together strawberries, raspberries, ground black pepper and violets. Like all our wines, it is great to drink by itself or with a wide range of dishes - and it's just that bit lighter than any of our other reds.
