La Ferme du Pasteur (Caroline & Rémy)

It’s pretty easy to pinpoint Chambre Noire as a sort of axis in the Parisian history of natural wine. While if at this point, Chambre feels just like another natty watering hole, a place to meet up for a solid apéro bottle near the Canal Saint-Martin on a balmy summer’s eve, in the not so distant past it was a bit more revolutionary—a ground zero for the new guard of natural wine taking hold of a younger crowd outside the walls of establishments like Saturne, Clown Bar, Bistro Paul Bert, and many other serious natural wine restaurants across the city. It’s difficult to say exactly what the style of wines imbibed at the original Chambre Noire was, but if one went even just a couple of times, it was obvious that there indeed was a house style, a certain energy to all bottles carried. Producers like Francois Dhumes, Radovan Suman, Marto, and Benoit Rosenberger come to mind—wines with a bit of an intellectual edge, but at the end of the day easy enough to drink and be satiated with before the next bottle got popped. It is exactly in this style that Caroline Connelly & Rémy Kaneko are working with at their young La Ferme du Pasteur estate in the Drôme, a department just south of the Auvergne. Rémy was after all a founder of Chambre, and La Ferme’s bottles quench with admittedly, a bit more seriousness and astuteness than one would expect. This is only the pair’s second vintage, but like last year’s beautiful premiere, the results speak for themselves.

Font du Loup 2022
Grenache
$35



Les Cairns 2022
Grenache, Syrah
$35