Producer Northern Rhône, France
Château le Devay
Château le Devay is at Saint-Romain-en-Gal, on the right bank of the Rhône about five kilometres from Vienne and two kilometres from the northernmost parcels of Côte-Rôtie, looking across at Seyssuel. Jean-Charles and Florence Fournet bought the property in 2005. He is a radiologist, she a speech therapist, and neither had made wine. What they had bought was an eighteenth-century house that had once been the rest house of the Archbishop of Vienne, a set of farm buildings, and 22 hectares of scrub and woodland where the land registry recorded vines that nobody had grown for decades.
It was their neighbour Pierre-Jean Villa, who makes wine in Condrieu and Côte-Rôtie, who told them what they were sitting on. The slopes around the house are schist and mica-schist, the same rock as the Côte-Rôtie hillsides two kilometres away, and they had never been farmed intensively. The Fournets brought in Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, the soil microbiologists, who identified the ground worth planting. The decision was taken in 2014, clearing began, the first vines went in in 2015, and the first vintage was 2018. Florence took an oenology diploma at Dijon in June 2018 so that she could work the cellar herself.
They did the planting the hard way and it is the most interesting thing about the estate. Around 90% of the vineyard is massal selection rather than clones, sourced through Lilian Bérillon in the Vaucluse and VitiSavoie in Savoie, with deliberate variety in rootstocks. In 2017 they planted 11,000 Riparia rootstocks bare and had them field-grafted from 2019 by Marc Birebent's team, using T-bud and chip-bud, an old technique that takes five years to work through because a rooting can only be grafted once its trunk passes two centimetres. The vineyard is worked by hand, by winch, by micro-crawler and by horse. Pruning follows the sap flow, the non-mutilating method that keeps vines alive longer and resists esca; it takes 130 hours a hectare, double the conventional approach. There are 1,500 metres of hedgerow, fruit trees planted through and around the parcels, and beehives. The estate has been certified organic since 2024 and is farmed biodynamically, with agroforestry and permaculture worked into it from the start.
Today the vineyard is seven hectares, five of red and two of white, making around 30,000 bottles a year, which is very small. In the cellar the fruit is picked by hand into crates over about a month, with several passes and drastic sorting, fermented on indigenous yeasts with as little sulphur as possible, reds on a vertical press and whites on a pneumatic. Whites go into barrel at the start of fermentation, in demi-muids of one to three wines, largely Austrian Stockinger, with some truncated-cone vat and 1,000-litre stoneware amphora, and are aged around ten months. The reds from Côte Levant and Côte-Rôtie get eighteen.
The estate wines are IGP Collines Rhodaniennes, because the land, for all that it sits between Côte-Rôtie and Condrieu, is outside both appellations. They are named rather than classified: Sous les Étoiles for the Roussanne grown on the schist, La Terre est Bleue for a macerated Viognier, Entre les Murs and En Pente Douce for other whites, Au fil du Rhône and Côte Levant for the Syrah. Separately, since 2019, they have bought grapes in Côte-Rôtie, Condrieu, Crozes-Hermitage and Côtes-du-Rhône and vinified them at the estate.
Winery at Saint-Romain-en-Gal, Northern Rhône · Roussanne and Viognier · £54.95 to £79.95 a bottle
