Domaine Cotze

From his home in Enveitg in the Pyrenées, just a stone’s throw from the Spanish border, winemaker Wilfried Garcia is forging new traditions in this high-altitude, little-planted region. Born and raised here, Garcia enjoyed the outdoors and participated in hotelier and restaurant work before deciding to pursue a fledgling interest in wines. He joined winemaker Tom Lubbe of Roussillon’s Domaine Matassa for two seasons, picking up an array of experience and skills before deciding to find his way back to the Pyrenees, where he’d start an ambitious winemaking project on his own. 

As part of this new project, he purchased and planted 2 hectares of vines on the steep slopes, at about 1300m of elevation. Co-planted among the two hectares are Mondeuse, Gamay, Pinot Noir, Chasselas, Chardonnay, Jacquère and Savagnin. 

While Wilfried waits for these vines to reach maturity, he produces négociant wines with fruit sourced from friends in the Rouissillon of Domaine Les Salicaires. Fruit from Salicaires is all organically farmed and grows from two main sites, one in Opoul and one in Canet. Both sites are only about 1km from the Mediterranean and sit on a bedrock of limestone and chalk soils; the Canet site finds more alluvial topsoil. 

He picks fruit from these sites much earlier than his neighbours, favouring a lower potential alcohol and leaner styles from his wines. After transporting them back to his high altitude cellar in the Pyrenées, the wines experience a very different vinification cycle than what might otherwise transpire in the Roussillon. Temperatures reach a maximum of 25 degrees in the cellar in August, and so the wines are able to ferment at a desirable pace. In the winter, temperatures drop dramatically, causing a sort of natural debourbage process in which the lees drop to the bottom of the tanks, leaving a crystalline, still juice to rest quietly throughout the season. 

While Wilfried waits for his newly planted vines to reach harvestable maturity, he’s channeling the energy of this peculiar region in his négociant wines. Despite their warm-weathered origins, the wines pulled from the tank in Wilfried’s cellar feel decidedly cool-climate, and representative of their new home in the mountains: each demonstrate a bracing acidity and wonderfully crystalline structure about them.