The Prettiest Gin in the Languedoc
Grégory White's one-off yuzu-infused gin was a highlight from the 2021 edition of Auvergne natural wine salon Les 10 Vins Cochons.
Grégory White is a former Parisian sports journalist, who did studies in Beaune before installing as a vigneron in the Hérault village of Aspiran, just northeast of Caux, in 2013. He makes a slim range of wines, and also sells grapes (and occasionally finished wine) to clients including Patrick Bouju. I met White earlier this month in the company of Axel Prüfer, with whom he’d travelled north for the Les 10 Vins Cochons salon in Auvergne.
Without wishing to neglect White’s reds and whites, what I like best of his work so far is a one-off gin he produced from a 2016 syrah-grenache wine he distilled.
“It was a wine I never had confidence in, so I never bottled it,” says White. “It felt like an old Portuguese wine. It wasn’t sexy at all.”
So White collaborated with the Gard-based artisan-distiller Julia Marti of Coeur de Cuivre to produce a fine with the wine. Infused one night with dried coriander, Sardinian citron, mandarin, and yuzu, the resulting gin shows a striking, faintly tropical profile, with a fine, filigreed persistence.
“There’s an art in Japan called kintsugi, a way of rendering broken pottery and things sublime by repairing them with gold-powdered lacquer,” he says. “So this was sort of a way to do kintsugi in liquid form.”
White’s terroirs in Aspiran are sands and galets. He destems his harvests entirely, for now, professing an unfamiliarity with how to vinify whole-cluster. He possesses a little over half a hectare of old-vine terret, from which produces his direct-press “White is Blanc” - a cuvée to keep an eye on, even if the 2020 was showing a little volatile in early December. (I am lately slightly fixated on finding more good natural terret.) He also produces a supple and fluid litre-bottled cuvée called “La Famille” from an obscure grape called chenanson (an early-ripening cross between jurançons noir and grenache) goosed with the addition of whole-cluster carignan at pressing.
Grégory White
16 Rue de la Cave Coopérative
34800 Aspiran
FURTHER READING
Languedoc blog author Alan March cited Gregory White’s 2017 “White is Rouge” as among his favorite wines of 2019 at A March in the Vines.
A December 2020 article on Julia Marti and Coeur de Cuive in Midi Libre.