From the start of the school year, the Wine Fairs are set up in most major retail chains, at wine merchants and on online stores. After a 2023 edition that was down both in value – 988 million euros (- 2%) – and in volume – 133.5 million bottles purchased (- 5%) – this year’s event will be essential for the entire sector, especially in a context of declining purchasing power. To guide you, L’Express presents its exclusive selection according to the different regions on its central pages, the result of tasting hundreds of samples and analyzing dozens of catalogs. On our website, you will also find details, chain by chain, with the different dates of these bacchic festivals that have become essential. Enough to enrich your cellar at a lower cost.
Tariquet, “the dried-up source”: the probable etymology of the largest family estate in France is enough to make you smile. Formerly a small producer of Armagnac, the Gers château nestled in the hills of Eauze has 1,125 hectares of vines within a 35-kilometer radius: a fountain with a delicious gurgling that fills 6 to 7 million bottles per year, synonymous with affordable pleasure.
Refreshing bottles with citrus and exotic fruit aromas, the whites of Yves Grassa and now his sons, Armin and Rémy, have been livening up student evenings in Bordeaux and Toulouse, ferias in the Basque Country and aperitifs on the Landes coast or the Arcachon basin for a good two decades. But like d’Artagnan, Tariquet’s fame has spread beyond its region: in a song by rapper Jul, the Gascon beverage rivals the superstar rosé from Saint-Tropez, Minuty. The estate exports to 60 countries, from the United Kingdom, where it sold its first dry wines in the 1980s, to Japan, where it is the official partner of oyster farmers.
Originally, a story of plantigrades
How did the small farm that distilled 40 hectares of Ugni Blanc next to a Blonde d’Aquitaine farm become this behemoth? The proverb recommends not to sell the bear’s skin before killing it. Well, without bears, Tariquet would not exist. We have to go back to 1885, when Ariégeois Pierre Artaud left his village of Cominac to seek better fortune on the roads, making his Pyrenean plantigrades dance at fairs. His path as a juggler took him to London (to Buckingham Palace), then to New York. But the adventurer did not have the soul of a migrant: in 1912, Pierre, back in France, acquired the Château du Tariquet, a pretty building with round turrets from the 17th century. And set to work on the land.
His granddaughter Hélène married the neighbour Pierre Grassa in 1946. The couple had four children. Maïté and Yves, the eldest and youngest, took over the farm in 1972: the start of a crazy epic and a turning point for the Gers vineyard. All fired up, the duo withdrew from the cooperative to distill and bottle their own Armagnac – the archives indicate the presence of a still in Tariquet as early as 1683 – and to approach wine merchants and restaurateurs directly, at the wheel of the Simca. “However, the latency time between distillation and sales, after ageing, worried my father, who imagined a short-rotation product to create cash flow”, says Armin Grassa. The first dry white was released in 1981 in 20,000 copies, three years before the birth of the Côtes-de-Gascogne. It is a table wine made from Ugni Blanc, a toasting grape variety whose freshness potential no one has yet exploited. “It will never work,” they predict. Maïté slips two bottles into all the Armagnac shipments. And it is in England that this light, fruity, easy-drinking UFO finds its audience.
An area affected by the Armagnac crisis
For ten years, the entire production, constantly increasing on cereal land converted into vines, was exported to the United Kingdom. Yves perfected the blend with the introduction of Colombard in what became the Classic, supplemented from the 1990s by a Reserve version aged in barrels, two sweet wines (the Premières and Dernières Grives, respectively made from overripe Gros-Manseng and passerillé Petit-Manseng), and a very Anglo-Saxon range of single-varietals – Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Chenin, etc. The estate quickly became too small, while local viticulture was hit hard by the Armagnac crisis: the gifted and bon vivant farmer transformed into a voracious businessman bought up the faltering farms around him. But the Grassa family do not abandon their proud spirit: the first family producers (140,000 bottles), they still devote 120 hectares to it on their most beautiful plots of tawny sand. Six barns scattered across their immense property, with dirt floors and walls blackened by alcohol fumes, house 5,000 barrels in maturation – twenty years of stock.
In 2007, the farm that Yves passed on to Armin and Rémy, then aged 30 and 29, already exceeded 800 hectares, with giant 160,000 hectolitre installations (vats as high as buildings) built four years earlier. The fifth generation stopped the acquisitions, keen “to make Tariquet grow in maturity rather than in size, with more structured wines to get out of the oyster-aperitif-feria box”, underlines Armin, the technical director. The Classic, a best-seller, underwent a small revolution in 2022 when Gros-Manseng, introduced in 2012, became the majority in the blend (32%) to flesh out Ugni Blanc, Colombard and Sauvignon, with an unusual addition of Chardonnay and Chenin for complexity. “With people drinking less, the same bottle must be able to follow from the aperitif to the main course.” The brothers have extended the range (eleven whites, one sparkling wine, two rosés and two reds) with Amplitude, a 100% gourmet Gros-Manseng; Imprévu, a blend of Riesling and Ugni Blanc at 9.5 degrees, a nod to their German mother; and Entracte, a sparkling wine (70% Chenin, 30% Chardonnay) produced in closed vats, prosecco style.
A real glass factory
For forty years, constantly perfected technology has been at the service of a style “on primary aromas” chiseled by the cold: dry ice in the tanks placed on the plots to protect the berries poured by eight mechanical harvesters; skin maceration in eight press vats capable of storing 50 tons of grapes (one day of harvest); conservation of the finished wine at 2 °C, in vats until bottling (as orders are placed) in a real glass factory.
The young Grassa have inherited the family obsession of “complete control of production, from the vine plant to the shipping of the box”. Armin even plans to manufacture, under license from his supplier Bioboon, innovative plant-based treatments intended to reduce copper doses. No organic label for all that because they have not given up weedkillers on this sandy-clayey boulbène terroir. “But all the technical choices, in the vineyard as in the cellar, obey the improvement of the quality of the wines at the same time as they must reduce the environmental impact”, he says. To guide Tariquet into adulthood after his growth spurt, the first winemakers of France have two mantras: “R & D and CSR”.
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