Eric Texier St Julien En St Alban Rouge 2020

Éric Texier came to wine without any family connection or romantic, multi-generational story. In 1992, after years as a nuclear scientist, he opted to follow his passion for wine and formally study viticulture and oenology at Bordeaux University. He read a lot, visited winemakers around the world, and worked in Burgundy with Jean-Marie Guffens, at Verget. There he learned the benefits of minimal-intervention wine-making: native yeasts, little to no herbicides, no machines, etc...

As a beginner, he was unable to afford his own vineyards, so he became a négociant, buying only from small growers philosophically aligned with himself. He has since acquired plots in Côte Rôtie and Condrieu in the northern Rhône, and replanted several hectares in long-forgotten Brézème with Syrah and Roussanne. All of his wines are aged in the underground 16th-century cellar at his home in Charnay-en-Beaujolais.

The longer story, from Louis/Dressner:

After giving up the idea of buying vineyards, which was too costly a proposition for a beginner with his ambitions, he started a small négoce where he selected particularly interesting vineyard plots worked by the sincere, hard-working farmers who grew the healthy grapes he wanted to buy and vinify. He rediscovered nearly forgotten areas of ancient fame, like Brézème in the northern Côtes-du-Rhône, and nurtured relationships with people who tend their vines with passion and care. Over the years, the shift from négociant to vigneron has occurred, and today Eric owns and rents the vast majority of the vines that go into his production. He has also replanted several hectares in Brézème and in Saint-Julien en Saint-Alban with Syrah and Roussanne.

In his purely négoce days, Eric was producing 30 different wines from 10 different origins, mostly but not limited to the Northern Rhône. As a land owner and vigneron, he produces 12 different wines from four different origins, with the Côte Rotie, Rasteau and Châteauneuf du Pape the only remaining cuvées made with purchased fruit. 

The wines are vinified in their areas of production, which means a lot of time management and traveling at the time of harvest. When they have obtained their AOC, the young wines are transported to Charnay-en-Beaujolais, just north of Lyon, where Eric lives and owns a wonderful élevage cellar. This beautiful underground, vaulted cellar was built in the 16th century, and temperatures stay cool and stable through the year.

Like all good winemakers, Eric strongly believes that wines are made in the vineyard, and that his work, after the harvest, consists in following the lead of the vintage and accompanying the wines so they fulfill their potential. Exact steps in vinification vary according to the varietals, terroirs and vintages, but the goal is always to provide the grapes, musts and wines with the best environment and to intervene as little as possible.

His techniques for white wines include sorting in the vines and at the winery, whole clusters pressed in a vertical press (that’s the old fashioned wood kind), no added yeasts, barrel, concrete and ceramic fermentation (no new wood), aging on fine lees, malolactic fermentation for all the wines, minimal use of SO2 at bottling only, no pump-overs, fining and filtration only when absolutely necessary.

For his red wines, he does the same sorting at harvest, no destemming most of the time, bringing the grapes to the press by conveyor belts, cold maceration under a CO2 blanket for aromatic extraction, natural yeasts, very little to no extraction during maceration and fermentation. The temperatures are controlled not to exceed 34 degrees C (93F), aging is done mostly in concrete, old foudres and demi-muids of 450L, no filtration and egg white fining only when necessary.

100% Syrah. From Texier's younger (20-40-year-old) vines, planted on a south-facing slope on granite soils in the warm St-Julien-en-St-Alban zone (in the Ardèche on the northern bank of the Ouvèze--to the west of the Rhône River, at the southern edge of the northern Rhône Valley). They are organically farmed and harvested by hand. The vinification and aging are identical to Texier's Brézème bottling and thus purely expressive of the much warmer, sunnier microclimate and granite-rich St. Julien terroir: whole-cluster fermentation with native yeasts in open concrete tanks with no sulfur and a 6-8-day maceration; no extraction techniques (only a submerged cap for gentle infusion of color and flavor); aging in concrete tanks on the fine lees for 18-24 months with no racking; bottling is without fining or filtration and with only a minute dose of sulfur.