Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert - Cité d'Aniane Mas Daumas Gassac Famille Guibert de La Vaissière 2015

Lot presentation

Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert - Cité d'Aniane Mas Daumas Gassac Famille Guibert de La Vaissière 2015

The wine

A blend of Viognier, Chenin blanc, Chardonnay and other varieties from Béarn, Provence and the Rhone, this white IGP Pays d’Hérault unveils a broad palette of aromas and a strong character. The grapes are harvested by hand before macerating on skins (for 1 week), which allows the wine to develop a golden colour. After an élevage of several months in stainless-steel vats, the wine develops incredibly freshness lifted by fruity notes. While it is unctuous on the palate, this pleasant viscosity is lifted by a vibrant minerality. It should be cellared for a few years and decanted before serving.

In the 1970s, the highly respected Henri Enjalbert, holder of the chair of geography at the Academy of Bordeaux, identified a terroir of 40 hectares in the middle of the Arboussas massif, in the Upper Valley of Gassac. The soil there is poor, but deep and perfectly drained: all the ingredients to encourage the vines to develop deep roots, without too much moisture, resulting in rare flavours and aromas. The vineyard's orientation on northern slopes reduces the amount of sunshine it receives during the summer. Every night, cold air from Larzac (850 m) flows into the valley, ensuring that the vines are kept cool, even in the middle of the summer. The vines thus tend to flower late and the harvests start nearly three weeks later than most of the Languedoc. The small areas of vines, swallowed up by the vast garrigues forest that the owners did not want to disturb, give the wines' aromas an exceptional complexity with notes of bay, thyme, rosemary and lavender. A substantial proportion of Mas Daumas Gassac's vines consist of Cabernet Sauvignon from the Médoc, as it was before the 1914 war. An uncloned grape variety, the same as when it produced historic vintages at the beginning of the last century. Traditional vinification is in the Médoc style: after a long fermentation (three weeks), the wines are matured in oak barrels, they are lightly fined using egg white, but not filtered. Mas Daumas Gassac's wines can be appreciated for their fruit when they are young, but they also reveal an exceptional potential to improve over time. The depth and complexity of their aromas requires lengthy aeration, ideally three of four hours or even more