Domaine de Carterole - 2021 - Organe i Co
$57
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Domaine de Carterole - 2021 - Organe i Co

Vermentino, Grenache Gris

Roussillon, France

Joachim Roque is a native of Collioure, the famed medieval town on the Mediterranean coast of French Catalunya. While tourism now reigns as its principle economy, for generations Collioure was a fisherman’s village. To supplement their income, keep busy in the off-season and have wine for personal consumption, all fishermen had vines. Joachim’s grandfather was the last major fisherman of the village, and from a young age his grandson would help out on weekends during the harvest. After a failed first year of university, Roque decided to stop school and start working; athletic and a fan of the outdoors, working in the vines seemed like a good fit. In 2010 Joachim decided to set out on his own and join the coop. He found a viticulture program in nearby Rivesaltes and enrolled in their first year teaching an organic curriculum. When it came time to pick an internship, Roque felt it made no sense learning in a mechanizable farm. It had to be his native terraces, and the tiny amount of organic producers made for an easy placement at Alain Castex’s Casot des Mailloles. With Alain he learned everything about viticulture in the terraces, which he’s summed up to us in three words: “xadic, xadic and xadic!" Today Joachim splits his time between 8.5 hectares in Collioure and 12 hectares in Saint-André. Still working at the 9 Caves, he is planning to build a cellar in Saint-André for the 2023 vintage. As of 2021, he no longer sells grapes to the cave cooperative; at the time of this writing, roughly 40% of his grapes goes into the production of Domaine Carterole, the rest into the Tutti Frutti Ananas project and to Bruno Duchêne. (Louis Dressner)