Having been boxed out of the more famous northern stretches of viticultural regions over the last, say, 15 to 20 years, prospective young farmers and winemakers in France have been looking to the Languedoc-Roussillon as one of the places they might stretch their wings. The region has become a real hotbed for new, vibrant wineries, as enterprising folks get their hands on old vines, affordable land, and space to work. Pierre-Nicolas Massotte, in a way, is a bit ahead of the curve: he and a few generations before him in his family are actually from the Roussillon, and a very particular area of it, at that. Leaving his city job in Marseille in 2004 and returning to family land, Pierre-Nicolas reclaimed and began to restore around eight hectares of the best plots of his family’s 40ha of vineyards, and Clos Massotte—an elegant garagiste little number—was born.

In the village of Trouillas, where Pierre-Nicolas is from, it’s only 15 miles from the Mediterranean if you drive due east, and perhaps 25 miles southeast to the dramatic coastal terraces of Banyuls-sur-Mer. In fact, Banyuls is the town and appellation where Pierre-Nicolas has many friends and closest colleagues, including vignerons like Bruno Duchêne and Laurence Mania-Krief of Domaine YoYo. All of this is interesting, as our fellow producer Jordi Esteve of RIM in Empordà, south of the Pyrenees, is also close with folks from Banyuls, and this overall picture contributes to our sense that Pierre-Nicolas is in dialogue with the emergent great wines from just north of and just south of the Pyrenees, along the sea, and into some of the mountain valley crags and corners that line this part of the (formerly Occitan and Catalan) world.

So, are the wines of Clos Massotte primarily French? We think not: they’re Mediterranean first, rendered from beautiful old bush vines, all at least 60 years of age and upwards into the centenarian numbers, expressing the full Grenache family, Carignan, Mourvèdre, Cinsault, Macabeu and two Muscats, all varieties that speak to the diversity of this pocket of the Roussillon-Catalunya border, grapes with slightly thicker skins or more sturdy wood in the vines. And indeed, what can be coaxed from them all, given balance in the soils, vines, and air from the sea is truly special. Pierre-Nicolas’ vines are tucked into a smaller mountain range of the foothills of the Pyrenees called the Aspres, with the snow-capped peak of Canigó visible from each parcel, and sea air palpable when you stand in them, too.

The resulting wines are both sturdy and agile: the whites are full of flowers, lush fruit, and oxygen; the reds are structured but fresh-tasting and seeming, not shy of their native tannic structures but not held down by too much weight or too many additions, either. While these wines are absolutely not glou-glou or particularly punk in style, Pierre-Nicolas does fermentations almost entirely in a mix of stainless steel tanks and big fiberglass, for freshness. He also prefers not to add SO2 if he doesn’t have to, but he will do so if he feels any given tank can’t be blended or bottled without sacrificing stability and cleanliness.

At nearly 20 vintages under his belt, we’re very excited to be adding Pierre-Nicolas’ work to our corral of folks from this wider region. If we had our way, we’d bring you a lineup with Clos Massotte smack dab in the middle of the following producers with whom we work: Domaine Sainte Croix in Corbières; Domaine Lampyres in L’Espira d’Agly, also in the Roussillon; RIM in Empordà; and Celler Frisach in Terra Alta. In the middle of this north-to-south lineup of five we cherish, you’d see the movement of natural wine in a place where borders are less relevant than growers, happy to be nestled in rural mountain valleys, overseen in both farming and winemaking by rugged terrain and the Mediterranean sea.