When one savors a red wine from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, one inevitably expects to experience the this concentration, gorged with sunshine inherited from the clay soils that channel water, and rich in rolled pebbles that store the sun’s heat during the day to rediffuse it throughout the night.

But when one tastes a wine from Henri Bonneau, one is completely overwhelmed and bewitched by this timeless nectar, leaving one’s taste buds as sole judge.

In order to try to explain this intensity of emotion, we must first of all talk about the great gentleman who unfortunately left us on March 2016, Henri Bonneau.

He was a true wine lover, of incredible bonhomie, a playful man, a genius wine- maker with a magical palate far from all speculation and modern winemaking techniques. He embodied the 12th eponymous generation to work the 6 hectares of old vines of the Domaine planted mainly with Grenache (75 %), Mourvèdre (10 %), Cinsault (10 %) and Counoise (5 %), on soils of large pebbles (called rolled pebbles) mainly on the Crau plateau, which many consider to be one of the finest terroirs of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Produced from old, low-yield vines (10 to 15 hl per hectare), the grapes would be harvested at high maturity and then put into long fermentation in concrete vats on indigenous yeasts, without temperature control and without sulphur. One of the particularities of Henri Bonneau’s wines also lies in the long ageing process of between 5 and 10 years in old Burgundy barrels – themselves 10 to 20 years old, with the aim of never « toasting » the aromatic structure of the wine but making it racier, deeper, and to heighten both its finesse and its complexity.