Every December we head to the South of France on a buying trip focused on the that year’s harvest. Along with time spent in the South, mainly in the Languedoc, one of the most important and exciting visits is to Plaimont in Gascony. It is from here that we source one of our most important and bestselling wines – Le Charme Sauvignon. Due to our very close and long term relationship (we were one of Plaimont’s first UK customers) we are able to blend own wines with their winemaking team.
The great thing about working with Plaimont is that we get to spend time with the brilliant and very talented head winemaker, Christine Cabri. First, she gives us an overview of the vintage – in this case describing 2024 as very good qualitatively, but with very low yields, especially for Colombard. Thankfully, Sauvignon fared a lot better in quantity terms.
Harvest began in the last week of August with the Sauvignon picked at the end of September. Regarded as a relatively cool vintage, this has naturally delivered wines at around 11%, which is good news with our duty rates!
The Charme blending was complete and we continued to taste some fantastic wines including a stunning old vine Colombard and a partially carbonic macerated Madiran which were amazing – more on these another day! I’ll leave the last word to Oz Clarke who also likes Le Charme Sauvignon:
"This must be one of the best value Sauvignons in Britain because it’s bursting with self-confident leafy lime-y, green apple-y freshness." Oz Clarke.
David Archibald
Sales Director
Back to blog