Château La Coste

Château La Coste is at Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, about twenty minutes north of Aix-en-Provence, and there is nowhere else quite like it. The estate covers some 200 hectares of vines, cypresses, stone pines, olives and oak, with a Palladian country house at its centre dating from 1682 and a winemaking tradition on the site that goes back to Roman times. It is also, and this is what most people know it for, one of the most ambitious collections of contemporary art and architecture attached to any working vineyard anywhere.

The list of names is not a marketing flourish. The entrance gate and the Art Centre are by Tadao Ando. The wine cellar is by Jean Nouvel. There is a pavilion by Frank Gehry, originally built in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery and shown in London in 2007 before being installed here permanently. Oscar Niemeyer designed a pavilion and auditorium that was among the last projects of his life. Andy Goldsworthy's Oak Room is built into an old stone wall from around 1,200 pieces of Burgundian oak. There is work by Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Sophie Calle, Susumu Shingu and Paul Matisse. You can walk the whole thing in an afternoon, and a good many people go for the art and leave with the wine.

The wine is not an afterthought. The estate was awarded organic certification in 2009 and the entire 200 hectares has been farmed organically since 2013. Since the 2022 harvest it has been fully certified biodynamic by Demeter, so if you have read anywhere that La Coste is still converting to biodynamics, that is out of date: the conversion is finished and certified. In practice it means green manure sown in the autumn, sheep grazing in spring and autumn, and horse-drawn tillage on the older parcels. In the cellar it means hand-harvesting, indigenous yeasts, cold tartaric stabilisation and very little sulphur. The first Demeter-certified wine off the estate was the Grand Vin Rosé 2022.

The wines are organic Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence and IGP Méditerranée. The red varieties planted are Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault, Grenache Noir and Syrah; the whites are Clairette, Grenache Blanc, Vermentino, Sauvignon Blanc and Ugni Blanc. There are three rosés, Le Rosé d'une Nuit, Le Grand Vin and Le Rosé Château La Coste, all Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence. There are four reds and three whites, a traditional-method sparkling called La Bulle de La Coste, and a non-alcoholic range called NOOH. The estate also sells Argentinian wine under the same roof, which is an odd thing to find in Provence and worth knowing before you order online from them.

Rosé is what the estate is best known for, and it is bottled in several formats, among them a 500ml and a magnum. The half-litre is the right size for two people on a warm evening who do not want to open a full bottle and leave half of it. The magnum is what you take to somebody's garden in August, and it stays cold in a bucket far longer than two separate bottles will.

If the architecture is what brought you to the name, the rosé is the everyday face of the place rather than the Grand Vin, and it is priced accordingly.