Rare is the domaine whose bottles you can find at pretty much every kind of wine-loving establishment throughout France. The first that comes to mind is Domaine Gramenon. From the hippest wine bars in Paris to the Michelin-starred restaurants in the countryside or the small shop in your favorite vacation village: a bottle bearing vigneronne Michèle Aubéry’s artwork will almost certainly hold a prominent place on any list or shelf.
      To produce wines that appeal to all of these various locales is in itself remarkable, but what makes this feat even more impressive is that Michèle and her son Maxime-François Laurent don’t farm and vinify one of France’s illustrious appellations like Morgon, Chablis, or Bandol; instead, every last one of their cuvées is classified as a “basic” Côtes-du-Rhône. What this tells you, of course, is that what is inside the bottle is all the more special.
      Nearly fifty years ago, in the late 1970s, Michèle Aubéry and her late husband Philippe landed in Montbrison-sur-Lez, a sleepy village in the southern Rhône Valley. This remote area offered Philippe—and Michèle during the hours she wasn’t working as a nurse—the freedom to pursue the avant-garde farming and winemaking methods they dreamed of, a luxury less practical in a more prominent, well-trodden Rhône appellation. Before he died, Philippe made distinctive and delicious wines, but ever since Michèle had to quit her nursing job to run the domaine full time, she has guided Gramenon to its current place in the pantheon of French wine. In the last couple of years, she has handed Gramenon’s reigns to her son Maxime-François, who also bottles some cuvées under his own label, but as you’ll see in the photo above, you can still find Michèle with a pair of pruning shears in the vines or in the winery adjacent to her art studio.
      At a Paris bistro or wine bar, you might find the playful and lithe white blend, “Pantomine,” or the elegant, peppery “Sierra du Sud,” a Syrah with sun-kissed southern aromatics and a northerly freshness. Walk into a wine shop in Avignon or Aix-en-Provence, as I did last winter, and you might be delighted to encounter a bottle of “Poignée de Raisins” or “Il Fait Soif,” two of the most lively and hedonistic Grenache blends you’ll ever taste. And finally, in this sampler, there are two of the family’s more “serious”—but still very fun—cuvées of old-vine Grenache that would fit right in on the lists of France’s best culinary addresses. “La Rubiconde” is poised, dark, and stony, teeming with notes of black olive and pepper. “La Sagesse,” meanwhile, carries the full flavor, succulence, and savory earthiness we associate with southern Rhône Grenache on the kind of graceful and lively frame you more often find in the north.
      All six of these are extraordinarily vibrant and versatile cuvées that embody an ideal intersection between progressive farming, meticulous “natural” winemaking, and honest expression of their unique Rhône terroirs.