Les Vignerons d’Estézargues, La Granacha Vieilles Vignes 2016

90 points Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
"The Grenache-based counterpart to the cooperative's Andezon bottling, the 2016 Cotes du Rhone Villages Signargues La Granacha is about 85% Grenache, with the rest being Syrah and Mourvèdre. It's a round, mouth-filling wine that has enough tannin to keep its bold black cherry fruit from seeming flabby or overdone. Thanks to importers like Eric Solomon and Jenny & François Selections and the deft winemaking touch of Denis Deschamps, the small cave cooperative in Estezargues has become a destination for bargain-seekers in the Southern Rhône."

Vinous Reverie Notes
Importer: Les Vignerons d’Estézargues is a co-operative in the small town of Estézargues located to the south and west of Avignon. The co-op is truly unique in the wine world. All over France the co-ops still play a very important role in the production and sale of wine. They receive grapes from members and then make wine from them in large batches from many different vineyards blended together with the focus on producing wine in quantity rather than quality. Les Vignerons d’Estézargues takes a fundamentally different approach; starting in 1995 the ten different growers in this co-op began to vinify their wine separately and make single cuvées from their best plots. On the heels of the single cuvée project, Les Vignerons d’Estézargues began to practice natural winemaking – possibly one of the only co-ops in the world to do so. They use no cultured yeasts, no filtering, no fining and no enzymes during vinification or aging and only add a small amount of SO2 at bottling. They produce both site-specific wines such as Domaine d’Andezon or old-vine cuvées blended from the site-specific wines after fermentation is complete, like La Granacha.