Château Coupe Roses, Minervois


Château Coupe Roses label

Country & RegionLanguedoc, France
AppellationMinervois
ProducerFrançoise Le Calvez and husband Pascal Frissant with son Mathias and daughter Sarah and partner David
FoundedLong ago: the Le Calvez family has been in La Caunette for 13 generations
Websitechateau-coupe-roses.com

T he family of Françoise Le Calvez—parents, son and daughter—manage Château Coupe Roses with passion and acumen high in the Mediterranean hinterlands. Their vineyards, now all farmed completely biodynamically, are in Le Causse and Le Petit Causse (a causse or karst refers to an enormous outcropping of rock— in this case, limestone—that supports little more than southern France’s omnipresent garrigue, olives and vines). These two delimited areas make up the highest growing zones in the Minervois appellation. At 750 to 1,350 feet above sea level, these zones have relatively cool nights and the growing season is the longest in the AOC (domaines down on the plain often begin harvesting a full two weeks earlier). The wines from Coupe Roses have excellent acidity and freshness, which Françoise always favored over the heavy and plodding characteristics of overripe wines. Her son Mathias, now in charge of the cellar, feels much the same.

Château Coupe Roses family

Françoise’s father hails from Brittany (Le Calvez turns out to be a common Breton name), but her mother’s side of the family has been in La Caunette for at least twelve generations. The village essentially is a one-street village strung along a bench at the base of a tall limestone cliff that towers above the Cesse River. Cesse shares the root word of cease and cessation, because in summer this river stops running. La Caunette, for its etymological part, is Occitan, referring to small cave dwellings—in ancient times, the locals lived in caves burrowed into the cliff. Just upstream is the village of Minerve, which gives its name to the appellation of Minervois. It sits high on a pinnacle of limestone at the confluence of the Cesse and the Rieussec, hidden in a mountain valley behind the first range of mountains after the vast Mediterranean plain. It was here that the Cathars (catharsis–to purge!) had a stronghold, which held out for months before surrendering early in a twenty-year crusade launched by Pope Innocent III in alliance with the king of France in 1209 that swept over the Languedoc and burned infidels wherever they could find them. They found a lot in Minerve.

Minerve and the Cesse River Valley at Château Coupe Roses

Most of Coupe Roses’ vineyards are on the plateau above the cliff, an arid, windswept place of scrub and rock–calcified limestone that microorganisms living in the threadbare soil eat into, creating pockets for water, soil and roots. Pascal Frissant, Françoise’s enologist husband, is fond of taking visitors up to the plateau to show them vineyards that appear to be growing in pure rock. He points out the odd olive tree here and there, the remnants of an ancient Roman road, and the fiendish rabbits that eat his young vines. Then he tells everyone to hush and listen. There is nothing to listen to; the silence is overwhelming. If you want to go crazy, he says, this is the place to do it.

In 2008, Françoise and Pascal purchased 15 acres (6 hectares) of vineyards in Petit Causse that are part of the Minervois cru of La Livinière. These vines grow on the highest point on the southern side of the Cesse Canyon, above Minerve. Indeed, these are the highest vines in the cru of La Livinière, which extends down the southern flank of the mountain ridge toward Languedoc’s great plain; the lower one descends, the warmer the terroir becomes. Coupe Roses doesn’t label a cuvée La Livinière because legally it would need to have a cellar located in the cru zone, but the altitude of their holdings gives them the potential to make the cru’s most elegant wine. A lot of the red grapes from this site go into their Vignals bottling.

Mathias Frissant of Château Coupe Roses

Today their vineyard holdings total 143 acres. Save for the fifteen acres in La Livinière, all of their vineyards are a hodgepodge of plots–some 40 total–mostly on the mountain plateau above their village of La Caunette (i.e., north and east of the Cesse Canyon). The soil is a classic French mix of limestone and clay, with the accent decidedly on limestone. The mountain elevations make for a cool microclimate in the sunny south of France, and this shows distinctly in their wines. In broad tastings of Minervois, Coupes Roses invariably lands on the fresh end of the spectrum.

The winery itself is a large nondescript building on one side of the village, while the “château” is an old automobile service station that Françoise’s father operated decades ago on the other side of the village. For years it housed the office, and the old garage was insulated to store the bottled wine. Time was, the sum total of high-tech wizardry at the domaine consisted of the wine press and a narrow gauge Lamborghini tractor. In 2009-10, the old garage was completely revamped (and covered with solar panels). Now there’s a tasting room and a new bottling line. In 2013, the domaine earned organic certification for its farming practices, and in 2021 it earned biodynamic certification.

In 2016, following his studies in enology, Françoise’s son Mathias took over as cellar master (he’s pictured above on La Caunette’s plateau in the winter of 2024). Among other changes, under his direction all ferments in the cellar are permitted to happen spontaneously, without additions of yeast or enzymes. Daughter Sarah is now heading up sales, while her better half, David Blon, changed careers to work side by side with Mathias. Previously, David had been doing advanced engineering studies in Toulouse and working as an acoustical engineer for Airbus; he gave it all up to move to La Caunette and get a degree in enology. This younger generation is now going full-bore into cutting edge winemaking and viticulture. Check out the photo below of some of the grasses they’re systematically sowing to rejuvenate their soils.

Coupe Roses' Mourvedre vines

A cool bit of trivia is that since 1991 a friend and colleague of Françoise and Pascal, one François Serre, had been the consulting enologist at Coupe Roses, and he assisted Mathias in the beginning. For an even longer period, Serre had been the consulting enologist at Château Rayas in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. During the pandemic, he retired and his son took over his responsibilities.

Another cool bit of trivia concerns the label. We started working with Françoise in 1998. In that era she had a pretty ho-hum label, and she readily admitted that graphic arts weren’t her forté. But the folks at Michel-Schlumberger knew a guy with such forté–one James Robertson, a Beatnik printer and designer who, with his wife, had formed the Yolla Bolly Press in Mendocino, where they put out letter-press publications (an all but lost art, then and now). Jim designed the current Coupe Roses label, the original one being the Vignals label, from which all else sprang. One of Jim’s claims to fame was that he designed the Ridge Winery label, arguably California’s most iconic wine label. The full story is here. For the Ridge label, he used a brand new font that had just been invented in Germany: the Optima type font. Much later, this font was chosen for the inscription of the names into the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.

Upper Minervois at Château Coupe Roses

Thanks to Jeff Bramwell for the shot of Minerve and Cesse River Valley, and to David Blon for the one just above of a few of Coupe Roses’ plots up on the causse, a.k.a., the karst plateau.

Watch a drone video of La Caunette and its vineyards here.

The Wines

WineBlendDescription
Champ du Roy blanc
70% Grenache Blanc,
30% Muscat Petits Grains
A hugely aromatic, dry blend of Grenache Blanc and Muscat from low-yielding mountain vineyards. This wine is not acidified, nor is it cold stabilized; malo is blocked. Yearly production averages 1,000 cases. Tech sheet here.
Frémillant Rosé40% Mourvèdre, 30% Cinsault, 20% Grenache, 10% Syrah
A direct-press rosé based on Mourvèdre from parcels chosen for this rosé, harvested by hand, and aged in tank. Frémillant is an old Occitane word referring to light red wine, and this is not a pale Provençal rosé--rather, it is a deliciously bone dry, character-filled rosé made by an artisanal family in the upper Minervois. Yearly production averages 1,000 cases. Tech sheet here.
Minervois
Cuvée Bastide
Even split Carignan and Grenache,
5% Syrah
The first of four Minervois cuvées, this one brought up in tank. A terrific buy for a true vin de terroir. In this wine is all the garrigue underbrush of the high Minervois, laced with high-toned blueberry notes and underpinned by Carignan's tarry black notes. Yearly production averages 3,500 cases. Tech sheet here.
Minervois
Cuvée Vignals

60% Syrah, 30% Grenache,
10% Carignan
We’re in the south, so pronounce that final "s." Vignals is the tier above Bastide and like Bastide, this is raised entirely in tank. Deliciously medium-weight, fresh, spicy, long, and infused with garrigue. Yearly production averages 3,500 cases. You should buy some. Tech sheet here.
Minervois
Cuvée Granaxa
Grenache cuvée with 10% SyrahGranaxa is Occitane dialect for Grenache, and this is Coupe Rose’s Grenache cuvée, raised in second and third-year oak barrels. Now we get into more weight and body, with distinctly earthy overtones in the red fruit. Their Grenache grows in their stoniest soils. Yearly production averages 1,000 cases. Tech sheet here.
Minervois
Cuvée Orience
Syrah with 10% GrenacheThis is the domaine’s top cuvée based on Syrah, made in barrels, about one-third of which are new. The Syrah comes from their limestone parcels with the most clay high up on the plateau above the village. Orience has black/blue fruit with spice, earth and elegance in spades. It's with this cuvée that the mountain microclimate really shines through. Production averages 600 cases. Tech sheet here.
Bara GwinCinsault 35%, Grenache 35%, Syrah 30% Françoise Le Calvez's father hailed from Brittany, and she still has the family homestead there. In old Breton, bara gwin means bread & wine, two of the essentials. This is one of the "natural" wines her son Mathias began making when he took over the vines and cellar in 2016. Initially, the endeavor was a competition with himself to prove to their enologist that it was possible to make a clean, correct and indeed good wine without the addition of either yeast or SO2 (the school of thought had long been that you had to use one or the other, that going without either was too risky--and it still holds, unless you have entirely healthy grapes and are hyper vigilant during fermentation and élevage). Once he proved that, he went on, with help from his sister Sara and her guy David, to expand the range with the cuvées Karst and Árgês.

Bara Gwin is made from grapes growing in the commune of La Caunette--the Cinsault and Grenache growing in the karst plateau above the village and the Syrah growing in a heavily clay zone. They are hand-harvested on the early side of pick dates and co-fermented in stainless steel after a 10-day maceration. Bottling is in the spring following the harvest. The wine has no additives of any sort; it is simply lightly filtered at bottling. Production averages 1,650 cases. Tech sheet here.
KarstCinsault 30%, Syrah 30%, Grenache 20%, Piquepoul Noir 20%Karst is a geological term for a huge outcropping of calcified limestone, one that in this case rises above Coupe Roses' village of La Caunette, which is nestled in the first valley of the Cevennes Mountains deep in the upper Minervois appellation. Like Árgês below, this is meant to be a transparent vin de terroir, one reflecting its arid, windswept conditions and its savagely meager limestone soils (the roots grow in the calcified rock, and the limestone wash of the wine over your palate is palpable). As such, each variety is de-stemmed and carried--no pumps, folks!--in buckets to its own amphora, in which the wine undergoes alcoholic and malolactic ferments spontaneously. These vessels are more porous than wood but neutral in aromatic and flavor compounds, and make for immediately accessible, juicy red wines--all of which is reinforced by aging over winter from November to March in neutral barrels. No fining or filtration, no SO2 or other additions. 250 cases. Tech sheet here.
ÁrgêsRoussanne 60%, Grenache Blanc 40%Pronounced Ar-jess, this comes from the lieu-dit of Babio to the northeast of the village (Karst comes from the north-northwest). The name is an homage to the ancient Greeks, who may have been the first to make wine in Gaul; it's their word for clay. The soil here is clay-limestone, but the emphasis is on the clay, and it's the coupe-roses clay once used by Françoise's forefathers to make roof tiles. This heavy topsoil lays 1-2 meters over limestone bedrock, nurturing just over three acres of Roussanne and just over one of Grenache Blanc. Harvest is by hand, the grapes pass over a selection table, fermentation is spontaneous (20% in neutral 500L demi-muids, the rest in steel), blending takes place in early December, and bottling is in the following spring. No fining or filtration, no SO2 or other additions. 250 cases. Tech sheet here.