Producer Southern Rhône, France
Château de Vaudieu
Chateau de Vaudieu sits in the middle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, on the route de Courthezon, and it is a real chateau rather than a name on a label: it was built in 1767 by Admiral Gerin, a lieutenant of the Marseille admiralty, and it is one of only three genuine eighteenth-century chateaux in the appellation. The name is a contraction of Val de Dieu, the valley of God. There have been vines here for more than two hundred and fifty years, and by the nineteenth century Vaudieu was one of only four Chateauneuf estates capable of making more than two hundred hectolitres of good wine.
The estate as it stands today was assembled by Gabriel and Juliette Meffre, who in 1955 brought it up to its present seventy hectares. Their daughter Sylvette Brechet took charge in the mid-1980s and her son Laurent joined her in 1990; his daughter Elise has since joined them. The Brechets are a Vaucluse family who have been growing vines in the southern Rhone for more than five generations, and they also own Le Plateau des Chenes in Lirac and Domaine Bressy-Masson in Rasteau.
The thing that makes Vaudieu unusual is the shape of the vineyard. Seventy hectares is a substantial holding in Chateauneuf, where most estates are a patchwork of small plots scattered across the commune, but at Vaudieu every parcel touches the next, all of them within about four hundred and fifty metres of a two-hundred-year-old cedar of Lebanon beside the house. Inside that block there are more than seven distinct geological formations, between eighty-five and a hundred and twenty-five metres of altitude: sand, the famous terraces of galets roules, marl, and slopes of limestone. It is a summary of the whole appellation on one property. Laurent Brechet has redrawn it into thirty-two parcels, and the cellar was rebuilt so that each one can be fermented and aged separately before blending.
That matters in the glass. The large proportion of sandy soils is why the reds here have such a fine tannic frame rather than the chewy density some Chateauneuf has, and the grey flinty limestone under the white vineyards is where the minerality of the whites comes from. Yields are low, around twenty-five hectolitres per hectare. For the reds Grenache is well in front, alongside Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault and the rarer Counoise, Terret Noir, Vaccarese and Muscardin. For the whites they use Grenache Blanc with Roussanne, Clairette, Picpoul and Picardan, one of the oldest and rarest varieties in Chateauneuf and one that very few estates still have.
Chateauneuf-du-Pape can be an inconsistent appellation. Vaudieu is a reliable address, and it is properly made. The Closerie de Vaudieu is the second wine, Grenache-led, and the accessible way into the estate. The white Chateauneuf is especially worth knowing, a fine example of what the appellation's whites can be. Above them sit Amiral G and L'Avenue, single-site Grenache bottlings at the top of the range.
Winery at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Southern Rhône · Grenache, Syrah, Mourvèdre, Cinsault, Grenache Blanc, Clairette and 1 more · £33.50 to £49.95 a bottle
