Le Soula Rouge 2013 Cotes Catalanes Languedoc-Roussillon

Le Soula was born in 2001 as a collaboration between UK-based wine importers and Roussillon-based winemakers. Wendy Paille currently runs the organic and biodynamic estate, whose wines are a pure expression of its "terroir d'altitude": not only cooling altitudes of the rural Pyrenees foothills but also soils of granite and schiste in an otherwise unforgiving climate. All of this is elegantly bottled into Le Soula's flagship red wine of Carignan, Syrah, and Grenache Noir. Despite being made from mainly old vines, the wine is a surprisingly lithely, silky meld of spiced black plums and black cherries strewn through fields of wildflowers and wild herbs underpinned by a distinctly woody, minerally, earthy savouriness.