Château Galoupet's Provence rosés

‘If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.’

That prediction, made by then-vice-president of the World Bank Ismail Serageldin way back in 1995, has been playing a lot on my mind. Drought years are becoming more and more common in much of Spain, Portugal, the south of France, Italy, Greece, Australia, South Africa, South America, California, even Oregon and beyond. The issue of water, however, is not just one of scarcity and it’s not just a burning question of supply and source for wine regions that have always been hot and dry.

When Serageldin made his prediction, he was talking about something much more nuanced. Because water is not in short supply – 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water; there were 148 flooding events around the globe last year classified by the World Meteorological Organization as ‘unprecedented’, costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives. And water is not a finite resource. We human beings will likely destroy this planet long before we run out of water. We won’t, in fact, run out of water. So why is water such an issue? More immediately, how the hell does this relate to a wine of the week? Bear with me, and the wine will be worth your patience in more ways than one.

That our planet is one composed primarily (at surface level) of water means that our survival is fundamentally plugged into the water cycle: precipitation down, soak in (plants, water bodies, soil), evaporation up. Rinse and repeat. A cycle that has sustained life on Earth for billions of years. In the last century or so, we have skewed this cycle in various, significant ways. Forests are an integral part of this hydrogen cycle, both as significant reservoirs and reservoir creators (their roots facilitate water-soil penetration) and as powerful evapotranspiration pumps. We remove more than 10 million ha (~25 million acres) of forest a year.

We also have ploughed up or concreted over billions of hectares of soil, removing plants at breath-taking scale, which interferes with evapotranspiration cycles and damages the land’s ability to absorb water. Now, when precipitation happens, it’s damaging, rushing nutrient-rich soils off the top of slopes, down to rivers, lakes, seas, where the intensity of the nutrients (exaggerated by overuse of agricultural fertilisers) causes algal bloom and devastates the aquatic ecosystems they end up in.

The results of putting spanners in the water cycle are myriad and manifold: droughts, floods, extreme precipitation events, coastal waters rising or receding, soil salination.

The response has largely been reactionary or helplessness: irrigate if you can; pump water out of flooded vineyards if you have the money or resources to do so; add chemical fertilisers to make up for the nutrients lost to erosion. All expensive, short-term responses rather than solutions.

Regenerative hydrology is a very new, very ancient practice. Few wine estates are doing it, and yet it is game-changing in the way that it addresses so many issues at once. The concept is one of biomimicry, going back in time to recreate features of the landscape that quite possibly would have been there before it was dug up and sculpted into vineyards. It combines agroforestry (planting trees among and around the vines, dividing the vineyards into smaller plots hemmed in by native hedgerows and creating woodland ‘banks’ at strategic points), year-round cover-cropping (no bare soil, ever, anywhere), and ‘water pacification’. The latter is a suite of techniques designed to slow, spread and sink water into the ground, and usually involves contour swales (shallow trenches dug horizontally along contour lines), pond series (cascading ponds streaming from highest to lowest), marsh beds and reservoirs.

So when Mathieu Meyer, estate director of Château Galoupet, kicked off our Zoom call with a mention of regenerative hydrology, my spine tingled. ‘This is a very dry terroir’, said Meyer, who has been a viticultural scientist with LVMH for two decades and has worked across a number of their properties. Unusually dry, even, as the property sits in a rain shadow. ‘For example’, he explained, ‘recently when there was a downpour, the properties 10 km away from us had 140 mm of rain. We had 70 mm.’

As soon as LVMH bought this somewhat rundown estate in 2019, with its 65 ha (160 acres) of vineyards and 77 ha (190 acres) of Natura 2000 protected native forest less than one kilometre from the Mediterranean Sea, they began converting the vineyards to organics. It is now the only LVMH property to be 100% organic certified. They’ve planted more than 10,000 trees, and plan to plant many more, created wildlife corridors, installed 200 beehives, are working with Conservatoire des Espaces Naturels to audit and increase the biodiversity in their woodlands and the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux to audit the bird and bat life on the estate. They have cut swales and drainage ditches, built ponds and buffer basins, planted hedges and established native ground cover.

To be able to irrigate the vineyard during dry periods, they’ve restored a reservoir that was built in 1890 with a 35,000 cubic metre (9.25 million gallon) capacity. The new winery runs on a closed-circuit water system to minimise water waste and consumption.

They have also been radical with their packaging. Rosé packaging, with Provence leading the way, is nothing short of outrageously ‘innovative’: crystal-cut punts, pink-plastic sheaths, bikinis and boobs, glass bottles that almost outweigh the egos behind them – nothing, it seems, is too far a stretch for rosé wine packaging. But the Galoupet team have bottled their Provence pink in brown glass. That, people, is revolutionary, good and brave, for three reasons:

1. ‘market expectation’ – every time I question a producer about why they bottle in clear glass, they answer that they cannot sell rosé in coloured glass. People buy rosé because it looks pretty, apparently. (Don’t you?) So to bottle in brown glass is a clear (pun unintended) message to your consumers: ‘we trust you to value quality and substance over trite appearance; we trust you to trust us’.
2. to avoid lightstrike, a significant (and, significantly, rarely spoken about) issue with wines bottled in clear glass – and quite possibly one of the reasons that so few rosés age well.
3. because, as Jancis explains, you cannot make clear-glass bottles from recycled glass – so all these rosé bottles holding wine designed for quick consumption not ageing (often overweight glass, in order to impress) are made from fossil-fuel-carbon-intensive glass.

Brown glass is radical in the rosé-tinted world. But they didn’t stop there. Their entry-level wine, G de Galoupet, is packaged in the lightest glass wine bottle available. Buy a bottle simply to feel what it feels like when you pick it up, both full and empty. I’ve just weighed the empty bottle, and it weighs 311 g (11 oz). It's also made from 85% recycled glass. (Their ‘grand vin’ bottles, also brown glass, but embossed with artwork of the surrounded garrigue, weigh just over 500 g. Globally, the average wine bottle weight is 550 g. The magnum, at 914 g empty, is the lightest magnum I’ve ever come across.)

But how do the wines taste?

Before I knew all this, I’d tasted the wines. Blind tasted them, in fact, because I am aware that I am inherently cynical when it comes to high-priced rosé and the might of marketing behind it. So I wanted to taste them without the noise of my own prejudice, in the context of lower-priced peers and rosés in general, before I tasted them with the voice of LVMH in my ear.

They are so good that my wine of the week turns out to be two wines across four vintages. G de Galoupet 2024 (shown above), the first vintage of this wine, is the wine bottled in the super-light bottle and capsule-free to further reduce packaging, landfill and carbon footprint. Twenty percent of the grapes are bought in from a network of organic-certified growers whom Galoupet intend to support in various ways to transition to regenerative farming and a network that they have planned to grow. It’s 60% Grenache, with dollops of Cinsault, Rolle, Syrah and Tibouren bringing the final pinch of seasoning. It may look as silvery-pale as the best of them but unlike many wan Provence wines at this price point, this is a rich aggregate of flavour, texture and energy. Roses and raspberries on the nose; apricot and apricot kernel, peaches and punch on the palate. Robust, by Provence catwalk standards. Defiant, by yacht-club Provence standards. Bright, robust and with integrity. It’s smashable.

The Château Galoupet Cru Classé also stands some distance from the typical Provence profile. Meyer points out that, for a start, the soil is different from the rest of Provence (which is sedimentary limestone and alkaline/high pH) – the vineyards are on an old mountain range and the soil is composed of metamorphic rocks, sandstone and schist; the pH is low, acidic. They are very close to the sea, the soil moving from deep, rich, fine soil closest to the shore to shallow, rocky, poor soils rising to 100 m (330 ft) farther north. Every parcel is picked and vinified separately, some fermented and aged wholly in stainless steel, others in oak barrels of various ages, and lees work depends on vintage and parcel. They blend the wine in December/January. With 30–45% oak ageing, the rosé is intended to have the power, structure, elegance and depth for fine dining as well as cellar ageing.

Although the percentages differ slightly from vintage to vintage, the blend is just over half Grenache, with Tibouren, Rolle and Syrah playing roughly equal supporting roles and a splash of Cinsault and Sémillon to light it all up.

After tasting four vintages of the wine, 2021–2024, it’s clear that this is a rosé that you’ll want to buy to age, or buy with age. The 2021 Château Galoupet is thrilling, just arriving at its acme in terms of drinking age. It fills the frame, commanding every corner and corridor. Honey, shell-like minerality and wonderful tension. It’s on a cusp of change and there is something thrillingly capricious about what’s in the glass right now. The vivid citrus notes are in retreat, although the fragrance and sweet intensity of ruby grapefruit still tingles in every sip. There is richness slipping through liminal spaces, trailing caramel, butterscotch, tobacco and cream. The faint green of angelica and sandalwood, left by the oak, along with its satin drawl and tug. And then flowers, tinkering with the finish, giving it a sylvan dryad lingering.

I would hold on to the 2022 for at least another year, or, if you have the 2022 in magnum, for another two or three years. It’s much more ‘shiny’ and youthfully tight than the 2021. Nectarine and honeydew melon grooved with citrus-peel and quinine bitterness. As it warms in the glass, marmalade, cardamom, pink Sichuan, sumac. Green tea on the finish. You can really feel this wine. It purposefully courses as if it’s trying to fissure a story of driftwood and swale, as if it’s trying to tattoo its tapestry on your tongue.

The 2023 is pronking with exuberance and hail-fellow-well-met fruit, despite the spicy reins of oak trying to pull it in towards gravitas. Musk melon and tangerine and crunchy Cripps apples outpacing the bay leaf, green cardamom and clove spices. Full of sass and attitude, which nonetheless doesn’t hide the fact that it has layers of flavour and taffeta texture. You could drink this now, and enjoy it, but it’s going to get even more interesting with time. The 2024 is not yet released and just a baby showing much promise.

I tried all five wines with food. I made a pissaladière, a Comté tart, a cauliflower-bacon-feta salad, a nettle omelette, a leftover-duck hash. It reminded me that when it comes to food, good gutsy rosé is like your best friend: by your side, ready for anything, open-hearted, no judgement, generous. Rosé is an all-year-round wine; a wine for food not season. The Galoupet wines are just that. All of them. And worth splashing out on. No need for yachts.

In the UK: G de Galoupet 2024 has an RRP of £22.50, is currently available from Ocado and will be in Jeroboams and The Good Wine Shop within the next couple of weeks and Laithwaites and Direct Wines this summer.

The Cru Classé rosé starts at about £40 and different vintages are available from a number of retailers at quite a wide range of prices (up to £70), so do your research. Unusually, Hedonism seems to be cheapest at £40, but also look at Farr Vintners, Cru World Wine, Jeroboams, Majestic, Selfridges, Harrods and others.

In the US, G de Galoupet 2024 is likely to be around $28 RRP; the Cru Classé runs from $41.99.

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All photos save the last are courtesy of the estate.

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Provence rosé sustainability drought

Tamlyn Currin