Côte to Coast

Elise Gaillard left her native Rhône Valley nest to run her family's rugged Mediterranean outpost

The steep vineyards that rise up along southern France's Roussillon coast, near the border with Spain, bear a strong resemblance to elise Gaillard's childhood stomping grounds in the Northern Rhône, with bush vines clinging to ancient terraces of schist.

"It looks a lot like Côte-Rôtie," says elise, who learned winemaking from her father, the legendary Rhône winemaker Pierre Gaillard. "It's almost the same geological age, and the schist has the same iron content."

There are, of course, some dramatic differences. Behind her, down a 100-yard slope of red rock, are the aquamarine waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Here, in the Banyuls appellation, her father bought an old winery in 2002 and turned it into the family's Domaine Madeloc.

The Roussillon region, nestled between the sea and the Pyrenees and Corbières Mountains, has in recent years become a destination for adventurous winemakers seeking extreme mineral-rich terroirs for Grenache and other Mediterranean varieties.

"Because my father started in the Rhône, this landscape didn't scare him," elise says, her light eyes brightening. "He loves schist. He loves slopes. He was used to working by hand."

In 2009, after Gaillard père parted ways with a pair of local growers who had partnered in running the Madeloc estate, he turned it over to elise, then a 22-year-old agricultural engineer who had worked several internships, including a stint at Qupe winery in California's Central Coast.

Today, at 28, elise runs the winery in a more-than-century-old village building in which she also lives. Her boyfriend, Florian Kesteloot, manages the 40 acres the Gaillards now own around Banyuls.

Even experienced vignerons like the Gaillards have found stark surprises here, including relentless heat and drought, ridiculously meager fruit yields, the violent northern winds known as the tramontane, and destructive floods.

"It doesn't rain until November, and when it rains it's crazy," says elise. She is at the wheel of her dusty, sun-faded Renault, stopped in a stretch of the low-lying Baillaury Valley where a crew is working to rebuild a roadway eroded by the 2014 floods. Months after the flooding, a local grower is still picking through the flotsam in his vineyard, which includes a wooden fishing boat that had washed up from the river.

"That's one thing we have to deal with that my parents didn't anticipate."

In fact, in Roussillon, the Gaillards have had to recalibrate some of their ideas about winemaking. "It's much easier to grow here because we don't have diseases and we have the sun," says elise. "But balance is difficult to get."

To avoid flabby wines that come from high alcohol and low acidity, the Gaillards learned to use the grapes from their hottest south-facing vineyards in their line of traditional, sweet, fortified Banyuls. Grapes from cooler vineyards are used to make a dry white (dominated by Grenache Gris) and three red blends (from Grenache, Mourvèdre and Syrah) classified under the Collioure appellation for dry wines.

Initially, the Gaillards bought about 12 acres of vines in Banyuls. Those original acres produced a meager 200 liters per acre—normal in this area for old vines in poor, dry, rocky soils, but about one-sixth the yields the Gaillards were used to getting in the Rhône. While low yields are often linked to higher quality, in this case, they feel going the opposite direction, step by step, leads to better grapes. By nourishing and working soils in their existing vineyards, and buying and replanting another 24 acres, the Gaillards have brought yields up to an average of 800 liters per acre.

Moreover, the Gaillards have found more balance in their wines. Though they came here for the soils, this family that has long worked with Syrah ended up falling in love with Grenache—a widely planted grape that they feel reaches its potential in these Roussillon terroirs.

"The schist gives Grenache something," says elise, "more elegance and freshness that you can't get from another soil."