‘Very complex and underpriced’ I wrote in my tasting note on this wine at a tasting of Yapp Brothers’ wares a few weeks ago. Excellent criteria for a wine of the week!
The other great thing about it is how well distributed it is around the world. It’s really easy to find in the US – Kermit Lynch of Berkeley imports it – and is also widely available in France as well as in Canada, Germany and Denmark. In the UK it’s imported by Yapp Brothers, whose Tom Ashworth pointed out in an illustrated email that a 10-cl glass of it is currently just £7.50 at Andrew Edmunds restaurant in Soho, which is, admittedly, famous for its keen wine prices.
He also commented about the producer, ‘Great wines and lovely people – Vincent [Cantié, pictured below] and Christine Campadieu. As you say, they have a strong export market, I believe they’ve worked with Kermit in the US for a long time. Checking our records, we picked them up in 1997 when Robin [Yapp] embarked on a foray to South-West France. We started working with Labasse (Jurançon), Ilarria (Irouléguy) and Ancienne Cure (Monbazillac) in the same year.
‘Despite being relatively niche, we sell a lot of it (it outsells their white and red Collioure combined) having a decent private customer following and thriving with the on-trade. I think its NV status (and therefore lower price) makes it a winner for by-the-glass lists. I am sure there are grander vintage Banyuls – Farr Vintners had a large offering at one stage – but few out there at sub £20 + VAT a bottle. Not sure I should be promoting it as a “cooking wine” but when Pierre Koffmann did his pop-up restaurant on the roof of Selfridges in 2009, he used Banyuls to make his famous pig’s trotter dish. We were delivering about four cases a week!’
I can vouch for Pierre Koffmann’s pig’s trotters, and remember well when another French chef Alain Senderens promoted Banyuls in the kitchen of his Lucas Carton restaurant in Paris for his famous duck dish, canard Apicius. This was much publicised when I was invited to give an after-dinner speech to the port shippers at the Factory House in Oporto. I remember the horror in the audience when I suggested that London restaurants rarely offered port and that, furthermore, there was a famous Parisian three-star restaurant actively promoting France’s answer to port.
To be fair, this particular wine certainly isn’t made in the image of vintage port – it’s more like a tawny. It’s a vin doux naturel, sweet because, like port, the fermentation is arrested by the addition of alcohol, although VDNs are invariably less alcoholic than port because the alcohol represents a smaller proportion of the blend. Rivesaltes, traditional Maury (not the new wave of table wines) and Banyuls are the most common VDNs, with Banyuls recognised as potentially the most sophisticated of them. You can read more about them and their chequered history in this 2013 article.
With the exception of the odd southern French Muscat, most VDNs are grown and aged in Roussillon. Those of Rivesaltes tend to be grown on the sun-baked plains in the hinterland of Perpignan whereas Banyuls has a much more interesting seaside terrain (identical to that of the heady table wine Collioure), as you can see from the pictures in this article, with schist often playing a part. VDNs can be aged in old oak of very varying sizes, sometimes in glass, in wildly varying conditions including just under the rafters and even outside (in the case of glass bonbonnes as shown below). These slopes are where the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean just north of the Spanish border (see this World Atlas of Wine map).
Grenache of all three colours, often planted as a low-yielding field blend on windswept hillsides in the case of Banyuls, is typically the main constituent and this wine is made from 90% Grenache and 10% Carignan. To judge from the rancio aromas, it has been long oxidatively aged – one-third apparently in this case in glass for 15 months before being returned to the rest of blend for ageing for several years in wood.
For those of us in the northern hemisphere it’s just the job as temperatures fall and the nights draw in. And there is no hurry to drain the contents of an opened bottle. Keep it cool and keep going back to it again and again. Lovely with cheese and nuts as well as with desserts.
My tasting note on this sweet but fresh 16% wine:
Nuanced fox red. Very heady. Lots of rancio. Very complex and underpriced. Vibrant with hints of dried gapes but not too heavy. Bit of tannin still. Good value. 16.5/20 Drink 2024–2029.
Yapp charge £25.75 for a full 75-cl bottle and it’s also available at £26 a bottle from the rather cleverly named Victor Indigo November of Newcastle upon Tyne. Multiple retailers in the US and France too, as I say.
Our members can find reviews of dozens more Banyuls treasures in our tasting notes database.
