Domaine de la Grosse Pierre / Domaine Pauline Passot

Pauline Passot worked in Lyon as a sommelier then travelled to New Zealand to work at the iconic Seresin Estate before returning home to the family domaine in 2016. She launched her own label, Domaine Pauline Passot, with the fruit from a small parcel of vines in Chiroubles’ Grille Midi, then two years later took over her parents’ property, the Domaine de la Grosse Pierre.
She now farms nearly 10 hectares of vineyards, most located on the steep granitic slopes of Chiroubles. Passot adapts her winemaking to the requirements of each vintage, varying the proportion of de-stemmed fruit to whole bunch based on the ripeness of the stems. Her style of extraction is always very gentle, however, resulting in the creation of wines with great purity of fruit and poise, and very little in the way of overt tannin. The Grille Midi, an intensely perfumed wine, is the only one still bottled under her own label. All other cuvées are labelled as Domaine de la Grosse Pierre, including Claudius, a hugely concentrated bottling based on the oldest vines on the family property, and Au Craz, a fine, nervy wine made from grapes planted in a high-altitude vineyard. There are a couple of other cuvées in the line-up; a rounded Fleurie Bel Air and a firmly structured Morgon Douby.