Domaine La Rouge Jouvence | AOC Grignan-Les-Adhémar

 A Love Story

Young couple, Justine and Valentin are both oenologists. Their domain was born in 2020, in the south of the Drôme, between truffle oaks, lavender and olive trees and is currently in organic conversion...

In 2017, while attending the School of Engineering in Viticulture and Oenology in Changins, Switzerland, Justine posted an ad for a roommate to share her small student apartment. Valentin answered the ad, visited, she accepted him as a roommate and their love story began…

Justine, originally from Alsace, is a confident, sensitive and driven Scorpio. Valentin, from the Drôme is an introverted Aquarius always in search of accomplishing great things and surpassing himself. What brings them together is their common passion for agriculture in the broadest sense. 

They decided to create a farm together and started the administrative formalities in parallel with their training as oenologists. La Rouge Jouvence was born. ‘La Rouge’ (Red) is the colour of power, passion, strength, love, but also of blood and wine. ‘Jouvence’ (youth) their energy pushes them to be exceptional, passionate managers of their domain. They therefore created La Rouge Jouvence, a fountain whose miraculous nectar will keep the one who drinks it young forever. 

Their founding project is the creation of a wine estate, based on the 9 hectares of vines owned by the Valentin family in the south of the Drôme, in the picturesque commune of La-Baume-De-Transit, whose grapes have always been brought to the cooperative cellar. They want to make wine, to see their wines being born and to drink the fruit of their work. Whilst still in school, they bought their first vines, old parcels of Côtes du Rhône. They signed a lease for a land located at 600m of altitude, between olive and apricot trees, on which they bet big in front of climatic change. In total, they took over 15 hectares of vines at the dawn of November 2020.

They lead a simple life in a small village in the Drôme Provençale. Their hair dances in the mistral wind and their skin is warmed by the almost omnipresent sun. They are the happy owners since August 2021 of a superb Provençal Mas, built of stone and decorated with blue shutters. In this building the agricultural annexes are much larger than the living area. As the ancients used to say "there is more room for animals than for people". They perpetuate the tradition by housing 200 laying hens as well their geese from Toulouse: Jeanne & Hector. In the yard of the farm, they are converting a stone house into a cellar. 

They improvise themselves as masons and are rebuilding the old stone walls, according to Provencal traditions. 

The cellar

The winemaking takes place in an old stone quarry dating from the 19th century where the temperature is 12ºC and the humidity is 90% all year round. The building, a place steeped in history, is dug in the heart of the mountain over an area of ​​8000m2 and offers the wines ideal conditions for their production and aging.

The wines

The wines are made with care and respect for the consumer, using a minimum of oenological inputs. Low doses of sulphites are used to preserve the work of winemaking over time and to produce wines in a precise and controlled manner. The terroirs give a different and marked typicity in each of the wines. The objective is to produce fresh wines, of great drinkability, with in particular part of the vineyard established at 600m altitude.

The estate cultivates 15 hectares of vines, some of which are eighty years old and composed of the king grape varieties of the Rhône valley: Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Carignan for the reds; Viognier and Grenache blanc for the whites. A conversion to an organic cultivation method has been initiated and the vineyard will be certified in 2024. The vines are scattered across different geographically delimited appellations: Côtes du Rhône, Grignan-les-Adhemar, and Coteaux des Baronnies. There are several terroirs: sandy, loamy, some revealing a strong presence of angular pebbles.

The parcels are located in the town of La-Baume-De-Transit. The terroir consists of ancient alluvial deposits of tributaries and sub-tributaries of the Rhône. The soil is composed of pebbles and gravels, very heterometric in a brown sandy-marly matrix with a majority of calcareous elements.