Slow wine, like slow food, asks you to take time over things, which is my justification for this interminable tasting note.

It’s our very great honour and privilege to introduce you to Elisabeth van der Bent, the owner and winemaker at Domaine Langlade. Only a fool with an inflated sense of their own worth would try to convey, through words, the extraordinary personality that is contained within her slight but spring-heeled frame. So, here goes. The wine world is full of energetic young guns, but we have yet to meet any winemaker with such boundless intellectual curiosity, with such a profound understanding of nature (on a biological level), with such self-effacing honesty and commitment to scientific rigour (she was a doctor for 35 years, so she eschews anything unempirical and saves her most precious Gallic expletives for Rudolf Steiner!), but most of all a winemaker with such a visibly radiant joy in nurturing her ‘blessed plot’ as Elisabeth van der Bent, and she is approaching 80 years of age.

 We have just returned from a visit to her domaine, a few miles to the west of Nimes, and our head is still spinning. Elisabeth is a one-woman perpetual-motion machine. She rises at 5am every day to check on her vines and her beloved pistachio trees (she swears by her homemade pistachio oil). Her eyes sparkle with wit and inquisitiveness, the conversation darts wildly between topics, her hands flapping in every direction while she speaks, her voice showing gravitas when an intellectual idea is fulminating, but she suddenly squeals like a little girl when she talks about her great love ("Mes vignes!"). We spent a wonderful morning bouncing around in her battered and splattered Peugeot 205 (vintage 1986), dashing from vineyard to vineyard with the same frantic urgency as the neurons firing along the pathways of her mind. Lunch was arranged for 1pm, where we would meet the person who tastes and passes final judgement on the wines before they are allowed to be released: her mother. There must be something in the water here.

 A long and leisurely lunch took place in the sun-dappled kitchen. Elisabeth's mother sat at the head of the table, warmed by a shaft of winter sunlight ("Je suis vieille, mais je suis pas bête" she confided), and we tried several vintages of their estate red, simply called ‘Langlade’, while Elisabeth talked animatedly about the history of the domaine, including an anecdote about when Thomas Jefferson, a great fan of ‘Langlade’ wines, came to visit (presumably sometime around 1785 when he was serving as U.S. Minister to France). Over baba-au-rhum, which is served every Friday without fail, her mother (101 years’ old) reminisced about her early childhood, remembering how she used to drink naturally-carbonated water from a little spring in the nearby village of Vergèze, which had been purchased and was being bottled for local consumption by the neighbourhood doctor, a chap called Louis Perrier. I told you there was something in the water! We were given a tour of the cellar, were introduced to the tortoises and bid farewell, so that they could prepare for a visit from the owner of Roc d'Anglade, one of the great domaines of the Languedoc, who comes around regularly and sings opera to the very great delight of the centenarian.

I'm sorry for waffling on about baba-au-rhum and opera and not talking about the wine, but I fear we are in danger of losing our 'human connection' and disappearing into a world of artificial intelligence, altered reality and siloed communities of the like-minded. Meeting Elisabeth and her mother reminded us that the most interesting wines are made, with love and care, by interesting people. I hope that if you give these wines a try, it will show through in their character and you will discern the 'house personality' of these soft and tender hooligans, wines made from hardy vines, whose grapes have withstood the dry Mediterranean climate and been tempered and cajoled into Pinot-like elegance by a pair of brilliant and devoted hands.

We have shipped two vintages of Langlade's eponymous red to propose to you, the 2022 and the 2018. The 2011 has been mellowed by age, so it is wonderfully supple and harmonious now, with the tannins fully resolved into the wine. Grenache is at the heart of the wine, ably supported by Syrah, Mourvedre and Cinsault and it’s a proud, 'barrel-aged' wine, matured for 3 years, like Barolo or Volnay, in large oak casks in the vaulted cellars beneath the house, to relax and mollify the fruit, offering notes of poached plums, loose tea, tobacco leaf and grenadine - soft, gentle flavours. It’s a wine for story-telling by a flickering log fire.

Madame Dufès, Elisabeth's mother, is obsessed with old, red Burgundy ("Faîtes-moi un vin vieux bourguignon!" she regularly insists) and is particularly pleased when her daughter makes a vintage that mirrors bygone Burgundy in weight and texture, if not exactly in flavour, as the wines are made from grapes indigenous to the Mediterranean, but this wine really does have a Volnay feel to it. Barolo too, with its long soak in oak drawing out an aged Nebbiolo character. The core fruit flavours are poached plum and cherries steeped in their own juices, but there are tertiary flavours of leather and auction-house furniture too, all cut through with this wonderful blood-orange juice acidity, bringing a jewel-like, ruby glow to the wine. The alcohol content is ‘old-fashioned’ too (13% is relatively light for this region), so the wine sits quietly on the plate, not agitated by too much spirit. Drink it, as we did, with slow-cooked lamb and root vegetables, or roast venison, beef wellington or just a classic Sunday roast. It's a lazy Sunday in a bottle.

Press review:

JancisRobinson.com (Tamlyn Currin): “There are times when the story is as important as the wine because it really is a part of what the wine is (and most certainly not a marketing exercise). The 2011 is (of course) different from the 2018, and I confess to preferring the 2018, but that's not to say that the 2011 is not beautiful. We're talking demisemiquavers of difference here. If you've walked in the woods and accidentally nudged a puffball mushroom which breathily erupted into a huff of mushroom smoke (a spore cloud, to be biologically correct), then you'd have a sense of where this wine starts. It starts with a sense of the beating heart of the earth, of mycorrhizal networks, of underground and under forests and umbral underspaces. The tannins are a teenier bit tighter, scrappier, than in the 2018, which is interesting – as if it's got a little tetchy and impatient with age. But that's ok, because it's a good-humoured tetchiness and the rasp is gentle. Like the 2018, it holds wild strawberries and dried orange peel in its beating heart, but now they're steeped in oolong tea and there's a perfumed fingerprint of potpourri. It feels as fragile and as strong as the paper-parchment skin and bony grasp of an old person's hand. It's an honour to pour a wine like this in my glass. Drink now-2025.” 17.5 points

Customer Comments:

"Opened a 2011 this evening, what a velvety pleasure, may well require more soon!" - Mr. A. S.

"I really enjoyed the '11 I ordered." - Mr. J.S.

“Loving the Langlade. Is there any left?” - Mr A.P.