Domaine des Enfants is a passion project of an ex-New York sommelier and her Swiss-born winemaker husband, who found a trove of old vineyards in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near France’s border with Spain. Most of the best-known AOCs down here are sweet wine appellations, such as Maury and Rivesaltes, but of course these days producers such as Domaine des Enfants are focused on dry wines: deep and textured whites from grapes like Macabeu (found also in Spain) and Grenache Blanc, and all manner of red combinations incorporating Carignan (often a star here), Grenache, Syrah, and other Mediterranean varieties. Stories like that of Domaine des Enfants are quite common in the Roussillon; the place is teeming with youthful energy (and old vines!).

The overriding passion of the Domaine des Enfants crew is biodynamic viticulture. They work their high-elevation, old-vine plots with horse-drawn plows, the gnarly vines rooted in combinations of granite, gneiss and, at lower elevations, iron-rich terra rosa. They refer to their wines as “manual” wines – as opposed to “industrial” wines – and the feeling you get when you taste them is that they are very much alive. Theirs is the kind of ‘anti-interventionist’ winemaking that has found such an enthusiastic audience: all grapes are hand-sorted, crushed, and fermented using only ambient yeasts in a combination of cement tanks and old, 600-liter barrels. All reds are bottled unfined and unfiltered, incorporating as little sulfur as possible.

And yet they are clean, beautifully ripe, combining great depth and texture. As I tasted this wine I was reminded of some of the great cru Beaujolais meeting balanced Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Whereas lots of Languedoc-Roussilon red can be rich, dark, even sappy (and often rather delicious) this one has depth but a certain buoyancy as well. It’s black and red and blue all at once, melding a very primary, forward mix of boysenberry, blueberry, and blackberry with a healthy dose of that herbal, sage-y lavender-scented Mediterranean scrub known as garrigue. You will want a case of this, especially for the upcoming holidays. One whiff of this wine and I was sold.  “Jouet,” by the way, means “plaything,” and there is indeed something very joyful, and playful, about this wine. At the same time, it’d be a mistake to dismiss it as ‘simple,’ be it because of its price or its somewhat ‘down-market’ label. Don’t judge the book by its cover (as I did)! This stuff is the real deal!