Crozes-Hermitage is one of the better known appellations in the northern Rhone of France with high quality wines at an accessible price. This red ticks all the boxes, and is a great wine to take along to a dinner party.

Having learnt the trade in Sur La Roche, and applied it in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Julien is a one man army, single-handedly pruning in spring and harvesting with a hired, high-end machine able to sort through and clean the grapes.

The final stretch of our dusty drive through Crozes-Hermitage to the vineyard was lined with fruit trees and wild ground cover, fantastic for bio-diversity, at the end of which we met Julien unloading a truck of this year’s bottles.

In his own words

"My two great-grandfathers cultivated the vines in the early 1900s... Both were called "Louis". Today, it is by thinking of them of course that I cultivate my small plots of vines. By taking care of their land, as my grandfather and father did, by working it in a reasoned way, to pass it serenely on to future generations... All this family love, built around the land and vineyards, you will hopefully find it in my first cuvées of Crozes-Hermitage..."

Julien’s approach to sustainably viticulture is a pragmatic one, in the summer’s heat of Crozes-Hermitage, Julien has found organic viticulture helps maintain more acid in the grapes which translates to beautiful freshness in the glass. He turns the soil twice a year and will complete conversion to organic certification by 2024. Finding few organic challenges in the naturally disease resistant hot and windy appellation, he credits his grandfather's apricot trees for keeping the soil healthy and fertilised.