Domaine Cros de la Mûre

For Éric Michel, making wine is as much of a passion as sales relationships are a chore. Fortunately, his sister Myriam has relieved him in terms of customer relations so that Éric can fully devote himself to his beloved vineyards. During our last visit, Myriam led us into the vines where Eric was supposed to be waiting for us. He finally surfaced at the end of a row of vines. He’d been doing observation work, he informed us. We smiled when we later came across a line on the domaine’s website: “Prevention and observation take up fundamental amounts of time.”

We maintain business relationships with well over a hundred producers, and Eric is quite possibly the most doctrinaire of them all. In his view, the following values are of foremost importance: geological richness, respect for (and integration of) the surrounding nature, cepages carefully chosen for their adaptability to any given parcel, manual tillage, freedom from all chemicals, attaining perfect ripeness within each cluster of grapes, picking by hand over a month-long period. He is a trained oenologist. His élevages are strictly in concrete tanks. Both his red and his white Côtes du Rhône are archetypal examples of the AOC, given the varietals, the powerful expression of fruit, and the almost overwhelming accents of garrigue—not to mention their structural virility (we’re speaking about his red wines, of course).