A wonderfully balanced wine with an impressive body.
Inviting deep black color with beautiful brilliance. Very fine on the nose, the wine shows delicate aromas of black pepper and wild berries. On the palate it is rich and opulent with strong tannins, which are perfectly complemented by a wonderful freshness that comes from the minerality of the granite soil. A racy and very elegant Saint Joseph that is still very young and should be stored for a few years until it is ready to drink.
We recommend opening the wine within its first three years and enjoying it with grilled meat, game dishes or a classic pigeon.
After a hot and unusually dry summer, the wines impress with their opulence, concentration and full-bodiedness. The maturation process makes the wines more pleasant and balanced.
Appellation:
The Saint-Joseph appellation is located between the villages of St. Pierre de Boeuf and Charvanay in the northern Rhône. For a long time, all the land there was owned by small local winegrowers who produced exclusively for their own consumption. Before them, it was monks who began growing wine here centuries ago.
Terroir:
The parent rock of the Saint-Joseph region consists mainly of granite and the vineyards stretch for 40 km along the right bank of the Rhône. For this first vintage of Saint-Joseph Rouge, the best grapes were selected from the northern vineyards of the appellation, which bring a lot of minerality and fruit, as well as grapes from the historic center of Saint-Joseph "Village de Mauves", which give the wine its impressive body. The result is a wonderfully balanced wine.
Maison & Domaines Les Alexandrins - northern Rhône
Three personalities from the northern Rhône Valley represent the new company "Domaine & Maison Les Alexandrins": Nicolas Jaboulet, 6th generation of a wine-growing family that settled in Tain l'Hermitage in 1834; Guillaume Sorrel, son of Marc Sorrel from Domaine Sorrel in Hermitage and Alexandre Caso, expert in the terroirs of the northern Rhône Valley.
They met in 2012 when Nicolas Jaboulet (who heads Maison Nicolas Perrin, founded in 2007) and Guillaume Sorrel and Alexandre Caso (who both founded Domaine Les Alexandrins in Mercurol in 2009) introduced plot-by-plot cultivation of the Crozes-Hermitage vineyards for Maison Nicolas Perrin wines. Their combined know-how has left its mark on the history of the northern Rhône Valley.
With a similar mindset, all three are interested in the great wines of their region and quickly had other big goals. In 2014, Alexandre and Guillaume wanted to further develop their wines from Domaine Les Alexandrins. At the same time, Nicolas wanted to establish his company Maison Nicolas Perrin in the heart of the northern Rhône Valley. And so a closer collaboration eventually came about.
Since 2015, Maison Nicolas Perrin has held a majority stake in Domaine Les Alexandrins, which led to the name change to "Domaine et Maison Les Alexandrins". This collaboration has enabled the Domaine Les Alexandrins' dream to continue - to produce wines from the northern Rhône Valley that are fundamentally classicist - and has also enabled Maison Nicolas Perrin to be transformed into Maison Les Alexandrins, thus extending the wine range known for its quality to all the appellations of the northern Rhône Valley.
Nicolas Jaboulet, Guillaume Sorrel and Alexandre Caso bring to light treasures, often forgotten or old vines from exceptional terroirs that express the splendour of the appellation. The three men benefit from the skills and experience of their parents and grandparents. They therefore produce only wines that reflect the Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Joseph appellations in their purest form, with their vines on historic terroirs. The domaine is therefore limited in several ways: in terms of appellations (Crozes-Hermitage, Saint-Joseph) and in terms of volume.
The work is carried out plot by plot. The vines are cultivated as they were in the past, in the tradition of the regional winegrowers. This applies to the Syrah vines in Crozes-Hermitage that are over 70 years old, but also to the forgotten vines in Tournon (Saint-Joseph) that are over 90 years old. And every year - whether the harvest is complete or not - the Domaine Les Alexandrins applies practices that are now often forgotten in the northern Rhône Valley.
Maison Les Alexandrins is the natural evolution of the former Maison Nicolas Perrin. The company had already been extremely successful and awarded many times since 2007. It continued to develop in the northern Rhône Valley by relying on very experienced people and concentrating on one domaine: the Domaine Les Alexandrins in the heart of the Crozes-Hermitage appellation.
The wines of Maison Les Alexandrins therefore reflect all the work of the domaine. They are more modern in their appearance (since there is little wine from the domaine, other wines are also offered, which was not the case before); they are more contemporary in their style (the aim is to achieve perfect harmony even in young wines, which thus offer early drinking pleasure); they are more varied in terms of the wines on offer from the northern Rhône valley (not just Crozes-Hermitage and Saint-Joseph).
This range invites wine lovers from all over the world to look at and evaluate the traditions of the Northern Rhône Valley from a new perspective. The range consists of both contemporary and timeless wines, coming from an exceptional terroir discovered by the Northern Rhône Valley terroir expert Alexandre Caso. Eight different wines embody this revived classicism.
Manufacturer: Nicolas Jaboulet, Maison Nicolas Perrin, 29 Côte des Chapeliers, 26000 Valence, France
