92 pts

Jeb Dunnuck

The 2015 Côtes Catalanes Grenache is a beauty and the finest wine I’ve tasted from this estate. Made by Richard Case, who’s the guru behind the quality of the Department 66 wines, it offers a deep purple color to go with ripe, sexy aromas of black raspberries, melted licorice, roasted herbs, and ground pepper. Picking up a terrific sense of minerality with time in the glass, it’s full-bodied, beautifully concentrated, and voluptuous, with no hard edges and a clean, weightless texture. It benefits from a short decant and will keep for 7-8 years. It’s a serious wine.

91 pts

Wine Advocate

Made by Richard Case, who's the genius behind the Department 66 wines, the 2015 Cotes Catalanes Tetu is close to 100% Grenache and from a top selection of vineyards owned by the co-op in Maury. There's roughly 7,000 cases of this beauty and it offers loads of sweet red fruits, (strawberries, cherries), pepper, iris and exotic spices in a medium to full-bodied, supple and sexy style that's about as drinkable as they come. Count me as a fan and it's a terrific value.

Walking along the rough lanes that lead to Domaine de la Pertuisane, wild sage, lavender, and the entire range of “herbs de Provence” overflow into the roadway, perfuming the air and providing a blanket of green camouflage over the area’s signature schist soils. The obsidian-black stones break like glass underfoot, hinting that there’s more than untamed foliage covering the rolling landscape. The delicate black stones form the backbone of Maury’s robust, structured reds, like today’s 2015 Tetu Red, a bottle Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate called a “beauty,” in a 91-point rave which offers up “loads of sweet red fruits,” and “exotic spices,” concluding it is “about as drinkable as they come. Count me as a fan and it's a terrific value." Parker wasn’t exaggerating about the value angle on this wine, it easily competes with French reds twice the price.

The well-sheltered village of Maury is also proving irresistible to Napa’s top winemakers like Abe Schoener, Dave Phinney, and star importer Kimberly Jones—the mastermind behind today’s Tetu. The 2015 Cotes Catalanes Tetu is the product of sheer determination coupled with the sublime talent of winemaker Richard Case, who owns Domaine Pertuisane with his wife Sarah, and partnered with Jones on this release. The result is a showstopping, opulent, Chateauneuf-du-Pape style Grenache that we can’t put down.

The story began for Jones in 2006 when she headed to France with winemaking phenom Abe Schoener, a story she told while filling my glass with the dense, delicious red,  “I visited with Abe, who was smitten with the area’s 100-year old Carignane and 60-80-year-old Grenache vines, which was all being used to make sweet Maury Sec wines! The French government was offering the locals money to rip up the vines and to plant apricots.”

But Jones wouldn’t have it. She saved the money and bought 7.4 acres of thick-trunked, ancient vines, which stand knee-high in sharp, black schist soils in the shadow of a ruined 13th-century castle, where Maury’s hidden terroir rises up between the jagged Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea. It’s an incredible deal, from one of the world’s last undiscovered wine regions.

This opulent old-vine Grenache that resulted from Jones’ savvy purchase combines mouth-filling ripe wild strawberry and black raspberry fruit with leather, garrigue, olive, and crushed rock flavors, with a mesmerizing blackberry and savory herb finish. Supple tannins are bracketed by chiseled schist-soil minerality and mouthwatering acidity. Tetu is a masterful blend of estate fruit from 60- to 80-year old vines rooted in the rugged, otherworldly hills of Maury, that drinks like a top-flight Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but is in a class all its own.

The first vintages of Tetu (2013 and 2014) were smash hits in Europe, poured by the glass at Michelin-3-Star restaurants including Spain’s famous 3-star Arzak in San Sebastián.