Maxime-Francois Laurent is part of the mother-son duo behind Domaine Gramenon. Co-authoring the wines at Kermit Lynch's Southern Rhone benchmark grower sounds like a full-time job, and yet Maxime also has an eponymous label for... Read More

Maxime-Francois Laurent is part of the mother-son duo behind Domaine Gramenon. Co-authoring the wines at Kermit Lynch's Southern Rhone benchmark grower sounds like a full-time job, and yet Maxime also has an eponymous label for wines he makes on is own.

They're beautiful wines that, like Gramenon, magically balance sunny, Southern Rhone fruit with a limestone structure and freshness that makes all their wines both deeply satisfying and compulsively drinkable.

Maxime's fruit comes from a neighboring vineyard that has, like Gramenon's, been farmed biodynamically for ages. The wines may be even more natural than Gramenon's (ambient yeast fermentations, no sulfur except a little shot after malos), but the farming and winemaking are so good that the wines are clean, pure expressions of fruit and climate and soil; they are not at all overly funky. Kermit Lynch doesn’t bring in a lot super-natural wines and the fact that he imports Maxime’s tells you a lot.

Drinking these isn’t really like drinking Rayas, although they both make refined Grenache in the Southern Rhone. In a way it’s more like drinking a francophile Tribute to Grace: silky but with a sneaky depth. It's a perfect wine for Grenache lovers, especially Grenache lovers who want to convert their friends.