Domaine du Mazel

I met Jocelyne and Gérald after Claire, who runs la Tour Cassée in Valvignères with her husband Jean-Claude, insisted I visit them during a stay in 2021. She kindly arranged a tasting at their cellar for the following morning. The gesture was my introduction to the generosity of spirit with which anyone who has visited the region is familiar. The tasting the following morning was an education in wine that I will never forget, free from the pretence and ego that too often characterises encounters with vigneron(ne)s of such esteemed reputation.

A venerable estate of Ardèche wine, Domaine du Mazel was founded in Valvignères by Jocelyne and Gérald's grandfather in 1919. Today, Gérald and Jocelyne farm twenty-two hectares or so around the valley, selling some fruit to local winemakers and making about 60,000 bottles per year themselves.

Le Mazel is a prelude for many of the region’s wine successes in recent decades with the likes of Sylvain Bock, Andrea Calek, Jerome Jouret, and Anders Frederik Steen all having worked with or at the estate before going out on their own. Gérald's influence can be felt throughout southern Ardèche, where the collaborative spirit he helped to cultivate has fomented a vibrant, dynamic scene that has few comparisons in the world of wine.

When the siblings took over from their father in 1982, they continued as coopérateurs, remaining active to the point that Gérald would become its vice president. Convinced by his wife, who had travelled with a friend to work in Beaujolais with Jean-Paul Thévenet, that something very interesting was happening in the region, Gérald travelled north, where over several visits he befriended Marcel Lapierre and Jacques Neauport. Inspired by the wines they were making, Gérald brought their methods back to Valvignères and decided to chart a new direction for his family's estate. They left the cooperative and began vinifying themselves, using Carbonic maceration for the reds, no filtration and no sulfitage. This was a radical move from Gérald, though perhaps more viable in Valvignères, which had long been seen as an agricultural, workhorse grapegrowing enclave that offered little in the way of quality. The freedoms this offered, along with the size of their estate and their ability to sell fruit, le Mazel could absorb the mistakes that came with learning to make wine this way, often keeping wines in their cellar for years before their release when they started off. They slowly moved away from barrels, preferring steel, and these days their cellar is stacked with great big stainless steel vats along with a large wooden basket press. Having narrowed the aperture of their intention the couple now make wines built on purity of fruit and mineral vitality, and the siblings produce some of the most rewarding wines money can buy. Developing their intuitions over 5 decades, nobody quite understands the subtleties of growing grapes and making wine in this valley quite like Gérald and Jocelyne.