Hervé Souhaut

Hervé Souhaut and his wife Béatrice founded Domaine Romaneaux-Destezet in 1993 at Arlebosc, in the hills of the northern Ardèche west of Tournon, on land that came down through Béatrice's family. The estate takes its name from Les Romaneaux, a sixteenth-century fortified farm on the site.

The holding runs to about five hectares in two places: parcels in Saint-Joseph, at Saint-Jean-de-Muzols above the Rhône, and vines in the Doux valley around Arlebosc. They are old, between forty and a hundred years, on decomposed granite, with schist in some of the Saint-Joseph parcels; the vines are propagated by massal selection rather than from clones.

The vineyards are farmed organically, the soils worked by hand and machinery kept to a minimum. Picking is by hand, fermentation runs on native yeast with a good proportion of whole bunches and a long, cool maceration, and the wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered with around 25 mg/l of sulphur. They are perfumed and light-footed rather than heavy, with the crunch and lift that granite gives. Arcana Cabinet lists five wines from the domaine: La Souteronne, his Gamay, from vines of eighty to a hundred years; the white, a Viognier and Roussanne blend; a Syrah bottled as Vin de France from the granite of the Doux valley; and the two Saint-Josephs, Clos des Cessieux and Sainte-Épine, the latter from very old Syrah on schist. The range runs to nine cuvées in all.