2019 Domaine Eyguestre Laurent Bellion Cotes du Rhone Villages-Seguret 750 ml

The renaissance of great wine in Europe after WWII is the story of small domaine-bottlers: people who formerly sold their fruit to a co-operative, a négociant, or a large winery. Suddenly, an ambitious kid decides to do it himself, and the family’s truly special old vines are now revealed to the world instead of being blended into anonymity. This is the story of the majority of the elite, highly collectible European wines we covet today. 

It’s also the story of Laurent Bellion, who started out just tending the vines, but got his winemaking certificate in 2009. By 2011, he decided to take his family’s fruit away from the Seguret village co-op and start making his own wine. Not too long after, Decanter magazine took notice, in 2015 naming him the “Top Young Wine Talent of the Rhône Valley.”

His home village of Seguret [SEG-yuray] is a storybook, medieval hillside settlement that, like its neighbor to the south, Gigondas, looks like something out of Tolkien. It’s home to the Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Seguret AOP, an appellation that savvy Southern Rhône fans have loved for decades for its Châteauneuf-style, Grenache-based reds. 

2019 was the 100th year of this family domaine. In that season, the stars aligned. 2019 was “extraordinary,” according to Wine Advocate, thanks to a very wet spring that allowed the vines to weather the hot summer and a harvest that extended into October. Bellion nailed the vintage, delivering a wine that brims with charming red raspberry fruit, toasted orange rind, fresh plums, tobacco, and cherries.