Coupe de Chance 2020, Maison Ventenac, Pays d’Oc

Fruity wine with primary aromas of grapefruit and lemon. A focused wine, well balanced and fres

​Winemakers Stephanie & Olivier Ramé, a husband and wife team, are the third generation of their family to run the show at Maison Ventenac. Their vineyards are in Cabardès, the only Languedoc appellation that allows both Atlantic and Mediterranean grape varieties, so offering a unique exploration of flavours. Their specific location around the village of Ventenac-Cabardès is famed for its limestone, chalky soils, which they say gives their wines their saline & fresh characters. The winemaking philosophy is to allow their unique terroir to shine through in the wines, presenting them as naturally as possible and raising in tuns, terra cotta urns and concrete vats to enhance their purity. They are also experimenting with winemaking without sulfites but deploying non-saccharomyces yeast to avoid spoilage from the likes of brettanomyces.

The village of Ventenac-Cabardès and the surroundin g region are famed for the distinctive nature of the
limestone vein running through them. The vines – pl anted on hillsides around Maison Ventenac – benefit fully
from this special soil structure, formed 50 million years ago when the area was still beneath the
Mediterranean. This gives these wines their mineral, saline and fresh character. Their vineyard work c onsists of
humbly preserving this extraordinary potential within our wines. Very little oak is used in the juice, mainly to
fulfil the goal of authenticity. The vines enjoy a lot of sunlight and sufficient rainfall, so they ar e planted at a
high density (6500 vines per hectare) which enables the vine to regulate its own yield and achieve better grape
concentration. It is a nocturnal harvest with the use of dry ice during fruit transfer to the winery, to avoid
oxidation. All the fruit is then hand sorted and pr ocessed into the pneumatic press. Processing of first juices
under inert gas (nitrogen) at 5°C then cold stabilisation occurs for 6 days with cold clarification. F ermentation
then occurs at 15°C in 300hl stainless steel tanks. No malolactic fermentation occurs. Ageing on find lees for
2 months.