Tireurs des Blancs Magnum - La Sorga

When Antony Tortul began producing wines with his négociant project La Sorga in 2008, the iconoclastic verve of his wines and the contrarian artwork he labelled them with cast the aspiring winemaker as a radical disruptor who held little regard for the time honoured traditions of southern wine. Those who paid careful enough attention, however, came to recognise La Sorga's annual production of 30+ cuvées as a vinous almanac of sorts. Sourcing fruit from Toulouse to Provence and as far afield as Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Antony's portfolio is a comprehensive catalogue of Mediterranean France and beyond, offering a revitalised perspective on the rich and diverse viticultural topography of the south, much of which had been subsumed by the paint-by-numbers approach demanded by volume driven production.
Growing up in the Ariège, where he hopes one day to return, Antony learned the fundamentals of winemaking through a chemistry degree in Toulouse. This academic foundation opened windows of opportunity within the industry, and curiosity steered his formative years, working as a nomadic oenologist and cellar technician across Bergerac, Corbières, Fitou and the aforementioned Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Here he could put his academic schooling into practice and sharpen his intuitions as a winemaker. Given that experience and the extensive network he had established, the decision to work as a négociant made perfect sense when he set out on his own in 2008. It challenged the idea du jour, that to make wine the proper way one must grow the grapes oneself. The breadth of his work, and its subsequent significance, would have been impossible that way; his preference was to focus on the winemaking, deepening his understanding of the endless configurations of varieties, soils and sites through his practice as a négociant.
I visited Antony and his young family at his cellar in 2021 (they have since moved), and the immaculate cleanliness was the first thing to strike me. It was a transitional period in the La Sorga story, a turning of the page, with Antony refreshing the intention behind his vinification, the reds especially, in response to the changing climate and his own evolving palate. Cuvées like Tireurs des Litres and Grande Pestilence, once deeply telluric and squid-ink dark, built for long ageing, had become lambent and sculpted, channelling the typicity of each site with clear-eyed precision. The decision to pick a little earlier and extend maceration times, inspired by his friend Alice Bouvot in the Jura, opened a new window of expression that has rewritten the rulebook yet again.
Incidentally, Antony was a founding member of Brutal!!!, an open-source wine label now used by vignerons around the world.
These days, Antony's skilled cellar work and canny grape sourcing are widely recognised and highly regarded, to the extent that he was the subject of a two-page spread in Jon Bonné's recent tome The New French Wine. Not that it makes much difference to him; when I messaged to congratulate him on this inclusion, he was unaware the book even existed...
For me, the wines of La Sorga provided a sort of onboarding to Southern French wine, holding a kaleidoscope to the region, with each frame glistening as brightly as the last. In the Anglosphere, terms such as wine lake are often the first that come to mind when we think of the Languedoc, but Antony's wines are a key to unlocking this treasure trove, discoverable to anyone who looks.

Ugni Blanc, or Trebbiano in Italy, is prized mainly for its acidity, and the majority of what’s grown is used for the distillation of Cognac and Armagnac. The long maceration here is notable, Ugni’s skins don’t bring much to the aromatics of this wine, but add some grip and length in the mouth. Terret Bourret is an old indigenous variety of the Hérault, a variety sometimes described as a sponge for the soils, retaining freshness late into the season. Here Antony pressed the Terret of the skins without maceration, with the skins of terret quite thick and rich in bitter phenolics. The fruity weight and way structure here comes from the Grenache Blanc, and with a 33 day maceration we also get some of the variety’s citrussy, herbal aromatics.

Grapes: Ugni Blanc, Grenache Blanc, Terret Bourret

Region: Montagnac, Languedoc, France