Chateau de Manissy Or d’Ange 2021

Dating as far back as the 17th century, Château de Manissy was once the property of the Lafarge family before they donated it to the local church. The Holy family’s missionaries acquired the castle at the beginning of the 20th century and began growing their own vines to produce their first Cuvée of Tavel wine. Some of these early plantings are still in production, with vines dating back to 1914.

They soon gained a famous reputation for their Tête de Cuvée, a barrel aged rosé, a wine which is till made today. Florian Andre, a young winemaker from Tavel, took over the vineyard in 2003 and continues the Holy family’s winemaking tradition. In 2009, he began to convert the entire vineyard to organic agriculture and today the estate is in fact fully biodynamic, eschewing the need for chemical treatments in the vineyards and working closely with nature to maximise soil and vine health, and seeing the quality of wine improve even further as a result. Today the estate comprises 60 hectares spread across Tavel, Lirac, Côtes du Rhône and a tiny parcel of Châteauneuf du Pape.

This orange wine is a skin maceration of grenache blanc, roussanne and viognier grown on a terroir of sand strewn of rolled pebbles on the Vallongue plateau where the vines are rocked by the sun and the Mistral wind of the Rhone valley.

The wine undergoes a natural vinification with carbonic maceration; a fermentation of 18 days whole grapes with indigenous yeast and no added sulfites. Daily manual punching of the cap maximises flavour and phenolic extraction

A powerful wine with marmalade, pear and black tea notes, mouthfilling texture and balanced tannins with appealing pithy freshness. This is a vigorous wine, full of energy that will pair with a wide range of flavoursome foods such as roasted chicken or paella.