Cahors: Valérie Courrèges – Zinzolin 2019

Valérie Courrèges, a young winemaker with a background in chemistry, returned to her homeland (Cahors) in 2019, following a demanding career as an oenologist at various wineries in California, Chile, and Provence. Alongside her husband, Mathieu Cosse, Valérie was able to purchase 22 hectares of gravelly vineyards from Clos Rességuier, and she quickly converted this land into a biodynamic winery. Valérie worked to make wines that were definitively connected to the local clay-covered terroir, pure and digestible. She managed to evade the oaky blandness of the more Argentinian-facing producers, while also evading the coarseness of past Cahors. This happened by allowing indigenous yeasts to ferment destemmed, uncrushed grapes in concrete vats, then later aging the wines in concrete tanks and clay pots.