Château Minuty owes its renown to its rosés, which over the decades have become one of the most recognisable symbols of Provençal wine country. As the year-end festivities approach, the Maison has nonetheless chosen to highlight a more discreet side of its work, through two cellaring cuvées named Jeanne and Gabriel, produced in limited quantities.
The two names are no accident: they take the first names of the couple who founded the estate, acquired in 1936. Giving cellaring wines, conceived to age for several years in the cellar, the first names of a property’s founders is a fairly clear symbolic gesture, one that tells a family legacy through cuvées which, by nature, take time to reveal themselves, in contrast to the image of immediacy often associated with the rosés that built the Maison’s reputation. Such a gesture goes beyond a simple marketing exercise: it places these two cuvées in a direct line with the estate’s history, at a moment when the Maison is choosing precisely to highlight a lesser-known side of its work.
Jeanne, Château Minuty’s first cellaring white, is a 100% Rolle from old vines in Gassin. The grape, closely identified with Provence, finds here an expression that the Maison describes as ample and gastronomic, with a saline finish that no doubt reflects the vineyard’s proximity to the Mediterranean. Its announced cellaring potential, between five and ten years, places this white in a category still relatively rare for the region, better known for wines meant for early drinking than for cuvées conceived over the long term. Such a choice also implies a different approach to the vineyard, since producing a cellaring white requires a stricter parcel selection than that needed for a rosé intended to be drunk within a year of the harvest.
Gabriel, for its part, explores another side of Provence altogether: a cellaring red made very largely from Syrah, aged for 18 to 24 months in new French oak barrels, with an announced cellaring potential of more than ten years. This extended ageing in new wood, combined with the stated longevity, places Gabriel in a register close to the great cellaring reds, far from the sometimes reductive image of a Provençal wine country confined to summer rosé. The predominant share given to Syrah in this blend reflects a pronounced stylistic choice, which clearly sets Gabriel apart from the most common profile of the region’s reds.
Conceived, both of them, to accompany gastronomy rather than to stand alone as an aperitif, Jeanne and Gabriel are aimed in particular at year-end tables, when meals take their time over several courses and wines able to accompany that duration naturally find their place. Beyond their intrinsic quality alone, these two cuvées above all offer another reading of Minuty’s craft, that of a Maison which, without renouncing the identity that built its international reputation, also seeks to demonstrate its ability to produce demanding cellaring wines, intended for a public different from the one that spontaneously associates its name with the colour pink.
This approach is part of a broader movement observed among several major Provençal houses, faced with the need to diversify an image sometimes judged too one-dimensional by part of the oenological press, which still often associates the region with light summer wines rather than with cellaring bottles able to rival, in ambition if not in renown, other great French wine regions
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