Today’s wine is one of the most exciting projects to come out of France in the last few years. “L’Enfant Perdu” is the product of extremely old vines, biodynamic farming, and two passionate winegrowers. By southern France standards, at $32 today’s wine falls on the more expensive side. But by any other standard, it is one of the greatest red wine values you’ll ever encounter. If this wine hailed from, say, the Rhône Valley, it would easily fetch $50-plus. And it would be worth it! But as it stands, this soulful Grenache-Carignan-Syrah blend comes in at a way more modest number while over-delivering in spades.
Such is the stratification of French wine that something as distinguished as this might struggle to find an audience at a higher price. Let’s just say there’s an incredible amount of pedigree behind Domaine des Enfants: This husband-wife team is crafting biodynamic, energetic, deeply expressive reds in one of France’s most extreme (and extremely beautiful) terroirs—the rugged Côtes Catalanes. “L’Enfant Perdu” is a magnificent wine of place, crafted by people who are truly connected to their land—their vineyards are hand-worked, plowed by horse, and farmed naturally. It is rare for us to offer wines from the Roussillon on SommSelect, but when we do, we aim to make it count. We showcased Domaine des Enfants’ entry-level bottling a few years back, and, while it was an unbelievable value and distinctly successful offer, today’s wine, their crème de la crème, is a true benchmark. It leaves no doubt as to the immense quality, ageworthy structure, and mind-boggling value of the best wines of southern France.
Traditionally, the broader area of the Roussillon (of which the Côtes Catalanes, or ‘Catalan hills,’ are a part) was painted with a pretty broad brush—as the home of chunky, rustic, hot-climate wines made in mass quantities. But, while Roussillon remains an incredible value play for wine lovers priced out of other regions, it’s also a place of great innovation and investment, where a new generation can afford to drill deeper into some amazing terroirs in search of something serious. Thankfully, stories like that of Domaine des Enfants are becoming more common than you may think; Roussillon is now teeming with youthful energy and old vines which combine to produce stunning wines that fly way under the radar.
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 and Grenache Blanc, and red combinations incorporating Carignan (often a star here), Grenache, Syrah, and the indigenous grape Lledoner Pelut, a close relative of Grenache.
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 black schist, granite, gneiss, and, at lower elevations, iron-rich terra rosa. They refer to their wines as “manual” wines—as opposed to “commercial” 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 for “L’Enfant Perdu” are hand-sorted, crushed, and fermented using only ambient yeasts. To take it a step further, this wine ages in a combination of concrete vessels and oak barriques, 15% new, for a whopping 28 months before bottling, unfined.
And despite the ultra-traditional
élevage, the wine is clean and beautifully ripe, combining great complexity and texture without being over the top in any way. Like the purest and most finessed Châteauneuf-du-Pape, “L’Enfant Perdu” has equally harmonious levels of depth and lift, blending a dark-fruited force with
garrigue, herbs, and a fresh bunch of wildflowers. The wine looks how it tastes—dark, deep, brooding—and the nose reveals a stylish mix of black cherry, boysenberry, black plums, and cassis along with cracked pepper, leather, clove, tobacco, mint, fresh earth, and supple spices. This full-bodied wine is ripe, luxurious, fresh, and ready to enjoy just above cellar temperature in Burgundy or Bordeaux stems. Decant it about 30 minutes before service to maximize the aromatics, and feel confident that it will continue to deliver immense pleasure over the next 5-7 years. Ideally, I’ll be enjoying it with something rustic and Mediterranean—Greek roast lamb with a traditional Catalan staple:
pa amb tomàquet. Cheers!
