la gramiere:

Our first order! Can you believe it? Last week we had dinner at a new restaurant in Uzès. With us we brought tank samples of our rosé and our Côtes du Rhône villages (grenache-syrah blend). The owners of the restaurant are Uzès restaurant veterans who formerly owned the well-loved Terroirs Café on the Place aux Herbes. Terroirs is a wonderful café-type restaurant with a small wine and local gourmet products shop as well. We became acquainted with Dominique and Frédérique Becasse through Terroirs. It's our favorite place to eat in the summer time. When they sold last year, we were quite distressed. There aren't many good places to eat in Uzès and we didn't want to lose our favorite. Luckily, they sold it to a young couple who have kept it largely the same. Even better, Dominique and Frédérique have now opened a full-scale restaurant in Uzès called Le Bec à Vin. Now, instead of one favorite place, we have two!
Dominique has been asking us for awhile to taste our wines. We decided that a Tuesday night in March would probably be pretty slow, and therefore a good night to take some wine for them to taste. We started with the rosé. Our rosé is 85% grenache, 15% mourvèdre, and weighing in at almost 15 degrees. It's a big boy (It was harvested the 7th & 8th of September. We didn't want our grenache to be so hot, but due to the drought, the sugars were particularly high this year). I was a little nervous Dominique would find it too alcoholic, but the one thing that saved our rosé is that it has very good acidity, therefore bringing a lot of freshness to the wine. Luckily for us, he loved it! So did we, as a matter of fact. We spent a lot of time tasting and re-tasting our rose. The wine just got better and better. It's definitely a wine to drink with foods, spicy foods, grilled meats etc. In the end he even said that we should compare it side to side with a Tavel from Domaine de la Mordorée. He thought that it would stand up to it very well!
We then moved on to the red, which still hasn't finished it's malo-lactic fermentation and, therefore, is a bit more difficult to taste. It's very aromatic in the nose, almost floral. It got busier in the restaurant so we didn't have as much time to talk about the red, but he said, " Just imagine, this wine isn't even finished, and it's a better wine than many wines already in bottle!" We talked a lot about pricing and he gave us some very good advice, even telling us to price it higher than we had originally thought. In the end, he said that he would re-do his wine list in July and would like to have both of our wines on the list, just about the time we are hoping to have the wines available for sale!!! What a great feeling, our first order!