Danjou-Banessy Clos dels Escounils 2020

The acidity of the wine comes from the Grenache Noir (picked with the Gris and Blanc, it’s slightly underripe), the texture from the Grenache Gris and the terpenes in the wine from the pine forest and thick rosemary bushes that surround the vineyard. Young, he reckons that the wine is more ‘terpenic, needs to calm down, is best with smoky fish cooked whole over the coals of an open fire’. With four or five years of ageing, it becomes creamier and can handle richer fish dishes. Slightly (delicately) smoky but the sweetness of stone-fruit aromatics developing over several days. Broad-shouldered. A long, quiet trajectory of flavour funnelled through a corridor of fine, restrained but unapologetic bitterness. Next to La Truffière, this wine has a delicate biddability, but that’s only in comparison. Its smoke weft into pomelo warp; its peach-sweet yarn pulled into silvery tension. It’s silk into stone.

There is a strong ley line of bitterness connecting vine, earth, man. In this glass, you can feel the thousand pruning cuts that go back nearly a century; the scars that turn to buds that turn to grapes that turn to wine. Year after year. In this glass, you taste wild-flower nectar, crushed rosemary oils, pine needles. It’s a wine with the texture of linen card, pressed with lemon blossom, olive leaf. It’s as delicate, and as strong, as a spider web. It catches the light through the dew at dawn.