Domaine du Clos des Fées

Domaine du Clos des Fées

【The estate that lifted Roussillon into another league】

In French a "clos" is a small walled vineyard and a "fée" is a fairy, so Le Clos des Fées is, quite simply, the vineyard the fairies would live in if fairies existed.

Deep in the garrigue, the dry Mediterranean scrubland, ringed by low sun-bleached stone walls, Le Clos des Fées looks like a scene lifted straight from a postcard. For generations beyond counting, growers here cleared the stones buried in these fields one by one, by hand and by horse, then patiently and ingeniously stacked them into walls.

The vines are spread across seven distinct sites, each one a terroir in its own right. One of them is blessed with a genuinely rare soil: red alluvial clay packed with the sort of rounded pebbles you would expect to find in Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

That acidic soil gives the Mourvèdre a depth found nowhere else. Vinification follows traditional lines, while the ageing varies by cuvée: stainless steel for Les Sorcières, oak barrels for the Vieilles Vignes, and oak for both fermentation and ageing in the case of Clos des Fées itself.

At the head of the domaine is Hervé Bizeul, crowned France's sommelier champion in 1981, and since then a restaurateur, a gastronomy journalist and much else besides — following his instincts wherever they led him within the world of wine.

There is a well-known story about the flagship cuvée, Clos des Fées 2001: in issue 16 of the Japanese magazine Winart it scored 96 points, edging out Domaine Gauby's Muntada.