La Croix Gratiot

La Croix Gratiot is a thirty-five hectare family domaine near Montagnac in the Hérault, sitting on clay-limestone hills between the Bassin de Thau lagoon and the pine woods behind it. The sea air comes off the lagoon and across the vines carrying the smell of the garrigue, and that is not a poetic flourish. It is the reason the wines taste the way they do.

Yves Ricôme farmed the family land here with his brother Hugues before setting up the cellar in 2004. His daughter Anaïs came back after travelling and learning her trade abroad, including a spell in New Zealand, and now makes the wine. The French wine press has called her the iconoclast of Picpoul de Pinet, which is a fair description of someone who has not stopped experimenting in either the vineyard or the cellar.

The farming is the thing worth knowing about this estate. They began biodynamic trials on a single parcel in 2012 and now run the entire vineyard that way, and 2025 is their first year of full Demeter certification. They plant mixed-species hedgerows along the parcel edges and the banks of the stream that runs through the property, they have trialled a row of aromatic plants every eight rows of vines, and they sow cover crops after the first rains following harvest to keep the soil alive through winter. Most of the picking is done mechanically at night, when the fruit is cold; some cuvées are picked by hand.

They are not a one-grape estate, whatever the shelf might suggest. Alongside Piquepoul Blanc they grow Roussanne, Bourboulenc, Viognier, Sauvignon and Muscat à petits grains for the whites, and Syrah, Grenache Noir, Mourvèdre, Piquepoul Noir, Niellucio and Pinot Noir for the reds. The cellar is a workshop rather than a factory: since 2012 they have aged wine in terracotta, ceramic and stoneware dolia alongside concrete tanks and demi-muids, buying new vessels every year to keep the experiments going.

Picpoul de Pinet itself is a small appellation of six communes around the Thau lagoon, made only from Piquepoul Blanc, which has been planted in the lagoon's watershed since the fourteenth century. Montagnac, where the domaine is, is one of the six. It is the wine the Bouzigues oyster growers drink, and if you have ever had a plate of oysters on the quay at Mèze then you have already had it in its proper context.

The Picpoul de Pinet is the classic: picked at night in two passes, one for freshness and one for aroma, fermented cool and aged on fine lees, made for shellfish. Bréchallune is the ambitious one, a single-parcel selection picked late and aged partly in stoneware jars, with more weight and texture than Picpoul usually carries. It is named after Nicolas Jules, a musician the family admire, which tells you something about how this place thinks.