Syrah vineyards high in the Corbières

I spent a late June day last year driving from Nice to Padern to visit Fabrice Monnin, current owner of the Mazière domaine. The sky along the road was alive with thunder and electric lightning storms, clouds slowly shifting in every which way, revealing heavenly light beams during a display of early Mediterranean summer rain. “I was sure you’d be late,” Fabrice noted to me as I arrived right on time at the cellar after a five and a half hour drive. “The cavistes from Montpellier usually say they’ll be here at 3:00, but that always means 6:30” he added with a small laugh and a glint of approval. It was a balmy late afternoon, and alongside my friend Szymon we tasted just about every permutation of Grenache from the cellar, including multiple barrels of the same vintage, each with their own unique characteristics. After a few Carignans and Syrahs, we concluded the tasting by sampling two barrels of perpetual reserve Macabeu, begun from Fabrice’s first vintage here in 2013. Feeling euphoric from these divine nectars, we all went back to Monnin’s place to listen to Keith Jarrett, grill some local sausages, and to converse slowly through the night over a magnum of Grenache. 

A trophy bottle from Monnin’s Jura days on the wall chez Lefort

Fabrice is from the Jura, and before working in wine he was a professional geologist. His interest already piqued by vin nature and early bottles from the likes of the Courtois’ and Eric Callcut, Monnin went to work at Jean-Pierre Robinot’s l’Ange Vin in Paris, and there took himself on a crash course of what is now considered only legendary wines. He went back to the Jura to start his cave a mange Les ZInzins du Vin, and even made a few bottles of Jurassic house wine for the bar (If anyone has any more details of these wines, please let me know. I have only seen trophy bottles at Aurelien Lefort’s place in the Auvergne, and in Tokyo’s Winestand Waltz). When the opportunity to buy the Mazière domaine, originally helmed by Jean-Michel Labouygues, came up in the early 2010s, Fabrice and his wife Momoko took the reigns and installed themselves in Padern, a tiny village that now houses the winemaker Marius Long, as well as Pierre Jancou’s Cafe des Sports, which actually never seems to be open. Both haunting and inspiring at once, Padern feels unique and magical, as if these hills hold secrets that could only be unearthed after years and years of making wine here. I sense that in Fabrice, that he knows this, and that even as a guy from the Jura, there is nowhere else he’d like to be making wine. Simply put, it is special in Padern, and if in a bad vintage the wines can be complicated, a good vintage provides the material for magistral bottles that defy space and time. 





C22
Carignan
$65

One per customer