Domaine Fontanel (Roussillon)

Domaine Fontanel has featured in the SVS range for no less than twenty-three years, under two different owners. Elodie and Mathieu Collet took over from the former vignerons, Pierre and Marie-Claude Fontaneil, in 2017. We loved Pierre’s wines back in the day, but we love Elodie and Mathieu’s even more. There is more expression and sense of place, with a lighter hand in the cellar. The wines are still bold and powerful — as the terroir demands — but there is now an extra dimension of energy and freshness to the fruit.

Located in the inhospitable hills around Maury and Tautavel in Roussillon, high above Perpignan, Fontanel make intense terroir-driven wines in one of France’s most extreme wine regions. The soils in this Catalan corner of France are poor. Eight different winds criss-cross the region and rarely stop blowing hard. It’s France’s sunniest region with 325 days of sun, which sounds a blessing, but increasingly raises concerns about drought and wildfires. Making wine here is both a physical challenge and a labour of love.