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Gaillac is a medieval town on the Tarn River located 50 km northwest of Toulouse, where you'll almost definitely be served a gastronomic meal of foie gras, cassoulet, and roquefort cheese at the various bistros and restaurants which spill out onto its old brick streets. This is one of France's richest and heaviest cuisines, and the wines are equally assertive in their flavor, weight, and strength.

The wines of Gaillac are anything but homogenous. Gaillac produces a range of wine styles exemplified by the excessive number of varietals allowed in its AOP. White and sparkling wines can be produced from Ondenc, Len de l'el, and Mauzac, while red wines can be made from by blending indigenous varietals such as Duras with Bordeaux varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

There's also the wild and gamey Fer Servadou which makes minor appearances in the various red wine blends of the French Sud-Ouest. But Fer Servadou is something of a specialty in Gaillac where it is known locally as Braucol. I've only tasted a few wines labeled Braucol and never really had a read on the grape until tasting Nicolas Hirissou's excellent 100% Braucol, named "Cuvée Florentin," at Domaine du Moulin in Gaillac.

Cuvée Florentin is a serious and sincere effort to show the very best of what Gaillac is capable of, and as Nicolas explained, is a varietal that is rarely produced to its fullest extent. "It can be very green and astringent unless worked the right way," said Nicolas, meaning that the varietal needs to be held to very low yields to show its best qualities. At its best, Braucol can be a densely concentrated, black-fruited beauty with a certain wildness about it, which Nicolas' 2008 Cuvée Florentin 100% Braucol demonstrated perfectly.

Braucol might very well be the surreptitious star of Gaillac but the appellation produces so many different types of wine - and a whole lot of it - that finding a good Braucol like Nicolas' one is like finding a diamond in the rough. To receive offers on hard-to-find, small production wines we invite you to join our client list. 

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In Kermit Lynch’s excellent book, Adventures on the Wine Route, he writes about not bothering with wineries which store their wine in tanks outdoors. You’ll have to excuse my selfishness for not taking the time to look up the page for a citation: whenever I open that book, I compulsively read it for several hours.

In addition to outdoor storage tanks, I find sales reps, glossy pamphlets, and tasting-room swag or chotskies to be a sign of . . . insincerity. So you can imagine my relief when we were greeted by a hungry herd of sheep at Château le Roc in Fronton.

Like much of the French Sud-Ouest, the Fronton appellation is comprised of rural, piecemeal farms and tiny villages far removed from the egotism of Bordeaux to the north and the sophistication of Toulouse just to the south. Fronton's red wine, based on the little known Négrette varietal, is in fact the wine most typically consumed in Toulousain cafés, and as we discovered, makes a fine match with the local version of cassoulet served with (what else?) duck confit and spicy garlic sausages. But Négrette seemed to show far less rusticity than the Duras and Fer flavored wines of neighboring Gaillac, and certainly lacked the abrasive tannins of Madiran's Tannat. Négrette, if anything, seemed more akin to a more deeply colored Beaujolais, or in the hands of Frédéric Ribes, an especially explosively aromatic style of Red Burgundy.

By "explosively aromatic," I am of course referring to the whole-cluster style of Pinot Noir produced at Domaine Dujac, Domaine de l'Arlot, DRC, and Cristom winery in Oregon. I’ve had an on-again-off-again love affair with this style over the years (currently an on-again relationship). My prior discontent with this style was caused by how it easily overwhelms terroir, but it nevertheless produces something intensely pleasurable in certain wines of certain vintages.

My visit to Frédéric Ribes' cellar at Château le Roc shed new light on this technique. The wines I tasted were obviously made in this style, yet displayed remarkable delineation from one wine to the next. Ribes' ultimate expression of Négrette comes in the form of Le Roc's Cuvée Don Quichotte, a 50% Négrette and 50% Syrah (the appellation stipulates the blend only needs be 50% Négrette), a wine of intense perfume and character and great aging potential. After a full day of tasting in Fronton, Négrette was a proven noble varietal and Le Roc its benchmark producer.

These are remarkable wines from an area we'll only occasionally feature in our offers as we tend to focus on more northerly appellations. That said, I find it impossible to overlook sunshine wines of quality and distinction such as these. If you'd like to purchase Château le Roc and other unique wines of terroir, I invite you to join our client list.

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When I worked for restaurants and hotels as a sommelier, I coveted the big-industry tastings because I could mingle with my fellow wine buyers for a few hours instead of unpacking wine boxes or re-organizing the cellar for the umpteenth time. At some point between signing off as The Boiler Room’s wine director and starting périphérique, I lost interest in such mega-tasting events. But don’t get me wrong: they provide a great opportunity to taste many wines in a short period of time. And to be honest, I’ve made a lot of successful buying decisions based on wines I’ve tasted with the huge masses of buyers and sometimes thousands of bottles. 

When it comes to selecting, however, a big-industry tasting is not the best way to do things, at least not for me. Today, I prefer tasting wines in the cellars of the people who grew the grapes and made the wine. Only by regularly tasting at the cellar can we follow a wine’s evolution from beginning to end and get the facts of its production straight from the producer’s mouth. Of course, the requisite time and travel is expensive (and comes right out of our bottom line), but that’s how we prefer to work, and that’s how we intend to select the wines we offer when you sign up for our e-mails.

In our e-mails, for example, you might see an offer for wines from Martin Foradori, whom we regularly visit at his J. Hofstätter estate in the northern reaches of Italy’s Alto Adige. We’ve now paid three visits to his estate (2007, 2008, and 2010) and greatly admire Martin’s range of wines. We’ve walked in the Kolbenhof together (one of Europe’s greatest Gewürztraminer vineyards), drank numerous older bottles of his remarkable Pinot Noir Barthenau Vigna S.Urbano, and shared many meals.

I’m obviously a fan of Martin’s work, so I expected meeting him and tasting new wines at a big-industry tasting in San Francisco yesterday to be predictably enjoyable, but I walked away from Martin’s table being even more impressed than ever. My notes on Martin’s 2009 Pinot Grigio and Bianco read: “why bother with PG from a different producer?” And on the 2009 Gewürztraminer: “is this the best Kolbenhof ever?” Even the Lagrein’s and Pinots seemed more expressive than usual. Maybe it was the 2009 vintage which was excellent, or perhaps it was because I tasted those 2009s from bottle instead of tank for the first time. Whatever the cause, the greatness of Martin’s wines really sunk in, in a setting where wines rarely show their best.