Chatons de Garde 2019 Magnum - Domaine Andrea Calek

During a trip to the Ardèche in 2021, I arranged by email to visit Andrea at his cellar. I had tasted the estate's wines on several occasions, in London and elsewhere, and perhaps cowed somewhat by his reputation, I was eager to learn more about how he worked and to explore the potential of importing his wines to Ireland. Following directions to the address listed on Google, I arrived at the cellar door wet behind the ears but with wind in my sails. After a confusing exchange with the bemused proprietor, it soon became clear that Andrea was directing unwanted visitors from Google searches to a neighbouring vigneron (Anders Frederik Steen, as it happens), a joke at both parties' expense. My first experience of Andrea's wicked sense of humour.

How a Czech ended up making wine in the remote valley between Valvignères and Alba-la-Romaine is a contested story, but what's certain is that Andrea managed to find himself in the right place at the right time on several occasions on his way to eventually establishing his own estate in 2007, buying 5 hectares from Gérald and Jocelyne Oustric, for whom he had been working. Prior to this, Andrea worked with Dominique Hauvette in Provence, successfully converting her estate's vines to organic viticulture. His time in the south was preceded by a stint in the Beaujolais, where he had fallen in with a progressive faction of vignerons like Guy Breton and Marcel Lapierre, whose influence remains fundamental to Andrea's philosophy of wine.

The story of Domaine Andrea Calek cannot be told without the reinvigoration Stephana Nicolescu brought when she joined Andrea in 2016, and she has since assumed the majority of the work in both the vines and the cellar. Stephana had been working with Loire vigneron Samuel Boulay, and had also spent time making wine in southern Spain. Today the estate is as much hers as it is Andrea's; she assembles a team of predominantly female vendangeurs for each harvest and ensures the estate's day-to-day running is relatively smooth. Stephana is fastidious in her management of the vines and delicate in the cellar, staying true to the estate's reputation for sultry, languid drinking reds and radiant, sinuous whites, while ensuring that every wine carries her recognisable signature (just not on the labels... yet).

The estate is a single block of about 4 hectares on the slope below the cellar, between Valvignères and Alba-la-Romaine. The soil is blue marl with a silty character, heavy and clay-like when wet and baking almost to concrete once it dries. Roughly half is Syrah, with Grenache, a little Merlot and a single row of Viognier grafted onto Merlot during a grafting workshop with other local growers, the fruit that goes to Pénultième. There are proper old vines - a parcel of gobelet-trained Grenache around sixty years old on very long rows, and older Syrah lower down the slope. Grenache is in gobelet, but Syrah flops if left alone, so it is trained low and kept aligned within the row, what Andrea calls a "crushed gobelet," a low hedge run without wires. Farming is largely by hand, with a tractor used from time to time. They no longer practise biodynamics, and they keep the certification off the label, explaining it only if asked. Sprays are the standard organic copper and sulphur, and disease pressure is usually low here, though a very wet spring can bring heavy downy mildew and long hours removing marked leaves by hand, vine by vine. Working the soils goes by every other row, one left in grass, the next lightly scratched to open the soil before rain, with the centre of the row left to whatever grows on its own. Yields average around 40 hectolitres per hectare in a good year.

The winery, built in 2010 on the Saint-Philippe site he took over from the Oustrics, is half dug into the foothill and designed to run by gravity. Grapes come in from above through three hatches and drop straight into the tanks whole-bunch, where fermentation starts. Sulphur is rarely added, though they prefer to add a small dose over losing a whole tank. Reds macerate whole-bunch for roughly a week to a month depending on the cuvée, worked by foot rather than pumped over; the free-run juice is drawn off and the marc pressed in a small 15-hectolitre Vaslin press, then the wine goes either to old barrels or back to tank until bottling. Wines that finish fermenting in barrel move to a fully underground cellar next door that stays cool and stable. During fermentation the tanks are tasted three times a day, morning, afternoon and evening, because an acetic spike can take a tank in the blink of an eye. The primeur cuvées like A Toi Nous, offering remarkable value, stay in tank for early bottling and come in around 10 to 12.5 percent, while more extracted wines like Chatons de Garde and Pénultième spend around a year in old Burgundy barrels, sourced by Andrea via his old contacts from his time as a barrel merchant in the Czech Republic.
The whites are fermented and aged in old barrels only, on very long, slow ferments that often finish well after the reds, with élevage up to about two years. They come in around 13.5 to 14 percent, and volume is tiny, roughly 4,000 bottles out of a total nearer 40,000, usually selling out within a couple of months. Historically the white fruit has been bought in, organic Viognier and Chardonnay from Gérald Oustric at Le Mazel, harvested by Andrea's own team.

The Calek estate is just off the road between Valvignères and Alba-la-Romaine, with the estate vines surrounding the cellar in a single block. When Andrea first arrived here to make wine, and for several years afterwards, he lived in a trailer by the vineyards, building a collection of old Citroen cars that remain strewn around the property in various states of disrepair. Andrea and Stephana have since built a cellar and bioclimatic home for themselves, and sitting on their front terrace, you feel how exposed the site is to the elements. The mistral blows strong, and devastating summer hails are becoming a regular scourge. The scrub and bush are sparse, and the sky feels heavy and close overhead. Here, in warm conditions on limestone and clay, Syrahs sugars climb fast and tannins and pigment accumulate rapidly. The semi-carbonic maceration teases out the subtleties of the variety in these conditions and helps to retain the elegant aromas of the Syrah.

Grapes: Syrah

Region: Alba-la-Romaine, Ardèche, France

ABV: 13%