Château Maris Les Amandiers Minervois La Livinière 2023

This wine shows how truly great wine from Languedoc can be - if you give it the chance to shine. It’s from Château Maris in La Livinière - one of the Languedoc’s best wineries producing rich reds in one of the Languedoc’s best areas. Ben Darnault of Mas Calamiac fame is the head winemaker here - everything he touches seems to turn to (liquid) gold. The reason this wine is so good, is that absolutely zero expense is spared in the making of it. It’s from the oldest Syrah vineyard at Château Maris, which is totally organic, biodynamic and dry-grown. The immaculate fruit is hand-picked in the vineyard and then each berry is painstakingly hand-removed from the stems in the winery. The whole process takes two days and ten people! But Ben tells me this meticulous work is completely worth it - it produces the perfect ferment and as a winemaker there’s very little he needs to do with it. The wine spends 18-24 months in new French oak and then finishes its ageing in concrete eggs. You end up with a wine with incredible intensity and gorgeous bright aromatics, but it’s also so easy to drink - which is how you know that Ben Darnault has had his hands on it. If you love a good Côte-Rôtie, but don’t love shelling out €100+ for it, then you’ll be in heaven with this wine.