Xavier Vignon (Consultant Winemaker, Rhône Valley)

Xavier producers a wide range of wines from the south of France. From the Rhône he offers a full range from a full and gutsy Côtes du Rhône to his top wine, a Châteauneuf called "Anonyme", a blend of grapes from number of his top clients.

Xavier makes some of the most distinctive wines in the Rhône Valley. One of his earliest examples was a blend from at least ten varieties from two distinct regions (the Rhône and the Languedoc) - and many more sub-regions - but it comprised wines from more than one vintage - as already mentioned, Xavier is a master blender! As such "Xavier Rouge" (or "Debut") could only be classed as a non-vintage wine. Oak-aged and very powerful, it was an astonishingly good value wine, sadly long gone.

However, Xavier has gone on to create many new wines since then including a multi-vintage blend of the top parcels of "Anonyme", ther first of these called "Reserve VII IX X" (there's an obvious clue in the letters!) and "Sacrilege", a blend of Cote Rotie Syrah and Chateauneuf Grenache which landed him in trouble when he labelled it Cotes du Rhone - it is not permitted to downgrade Chateauneuf except to Vin de France - so this wine is now made using Grenache from Gigondas and has been renamed "SM" after Septrionale (the French name for the northern Rhône) and Meridionale (southern Rhône).

More recently, Xavier has been working on a special limited production range called the Arcane Series. There will be 20 wines in this range, all labelled with Tarot images. Early bottlings included "Le Soleil", "La Lune" and "Le Diable". They are all xquisite examples of specific varieties and/or terroirs.