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Banyuls Grand Cru, L'Archiviste/Domaines et Terroirs du Sud 1955

Tasting Notes

...Seriously good-value sweet wine antiques that you can drink over quite a time as they retain their fruit and freshness well in an opened bottle...Roussillon around Perpignan just north of the Pyrenees has for decades been most famous with French wine drinkers for its strong sweet wines with names such as Banyuls, Maury and Rivesaltes. These depend mainly on old Grenache bushvines in varying colours of grapes which reach great ripeness in the region’s hot, windy summers. They are typically vinified like port, the grape sugar being retained in the wine by stopping fermentation with added alcohol (particularly strong and pure in this case), and are then aged in wood or glass for very long periods. Some wines here are put into glass bonbonnes and even deliberately exposed to heat as in the Madeira process. The result is a wide range of different strong, sweet wines (vins doux naturels in French) which are virtually indestructible but, while they fit in to a wine drinker’s repertoire very much like a port, they are much rarer than port and many tasters, even quite experienced ones, have little exposure to the various styles on offer.

Jancis Robinson MW, JancisRobinson.com, May 2005
Please note that these tasting notes/scores are not intended to be exhaustive and in some cases they may not be the most recently published figures. However, we always do our best to add latest scores and reviews when these come to our attention. We advise customers who wish to purchase wines based simply on critical reviews to carry out further research into the latest reports.