Berry Bros. & Rudd: We need to talk about Gringet

By James Bayley

Published: 21 September, 2023

There are only 22ha of the Gringet grape variety left in the world, and 9.5 of them were owned by Dominique Belluard, the late Savoie producer. Before his death in 2020, Belluard developed the rare Gringet grape from something producers would just chuck into blends, to bonafide, standalone, single-varietal wines.

In the absence of a successor, his wife, Valerie Belluard, sold the estate to a young winemaker, Vincent Ruiz, who had been working for renowned Rhone Valley producer Franck Balthazar.

In the rustic cellars of Berry Bros. & Rudd, Belluard’s legacy is being kept alive, introducing many veterans of a trade to a grape they had never tried before.

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Launching with Berry Bros for the first time this year are three Domaine du Gringet wines, one sparkling and two still whites.

Catriona Felstead MW, wine buyer for Berry Bros. & Rudd said: “Those three wines are effectively a transitionary parcel, they are the last wines that Dominique Belluard actually harvested and they had a year's élevage under his watch, in the cellar. Then, after he died, just for that vintage, Valerie, his wife, brought in Jean-François Ganevat, who is a Jura superstar, to finish the blend-to-bottle line.”

Felstead, who introduced the wines to the Berry Bros line, added: “Tasting Gringet at first, is a bit of a challenge if you’ve never tasted Gringet before, I hadn’t until January this year. For me, it’s incredibly exciting, to bring a grape variety that 99.9% of our customers (and staff) haven’t tried before – how often do you get the chance to bring that experience to people?”

With its long history, (Berry Bros was founded in 1698), the stalwart merchant is proud to champion wines with a storied past.

“Vincent [Ruiz] has literally upped his life and moved to a little village called Ayse in Savoie, a rural village about 30 minutes from Geneva, and he’s made it his vigneron, it’s his project on a day-to-day basis, and Balthazar inputs his thoughts along the way,” added Felstead.

Moving forward, Ruiz and Balthazar plan to reduce the yields and discontinue the sparkling to solely focus on the terroir-specific expression of Gringet. Regardless of price, Berry Bros has always strived to find value, so do customers need to strike whilst the iron is hot, amidst the prospect of lower yields?

“I imagine prices will increase a bit, they are not ‘cheap, cheap’. I think they will end up being Monsieur Gringet type level (£56) rather than Eponyme (£38),” said Felstead.

“A third of the Monsieur Gringet blend is from a vineyard called Le Feu, which was Dominique’s most-prized vineyard, and they are going to be making a 100% Le Feu Cuvee, which is likely to be supercharged Gringet, but in a hands-off kind of way,” she added.

As for the wine itself, Gringet is a formidable grape and one that customers might find quite divisive.

Felstead said: “I have always had the belief that a wine tasting should be subjective, but these wines challenge your mind a bit. You’ve got the Eponyme, which is quite floral and open and Monsieur Gringet is a bit more serious and reductive. But both, on the palate, have that linearity that I associate with Riesling and it’s wonderful to taste something that’s not within my sort of appreciation of what I’ve tasted before.”

As always, Berry Bros has added to its ever-popular own-label wines, which often allow customers access to producers that are typically hard to find or tightly allocated, the new Swartland Red and Swartland White from Eben Sadie are a perfect case in point.

“We have just introduced two new own-label Swartland wines, made for us by Eben Sadie and for me, that’s just amazing, I would never have thought that Eben would have surplus fruit to make an own label with. It turns out, for a few years, he’s had these younger vines coming through and he’s been looking to turn them into a worthy wine rather than just sell off the fruit, which is what he had been doing,” said Felstead.

Despite the success of its own-label wine, Berry Bros has no plans to further expand its range in the future.

“We don’t want to proliferate and dilute what we do, we want to keep it focused. For us it's about partnerships, we are always happy to have a chat about whether or not there is an opportunity,” said Felstead.

Right across the tasting, there was an emphasis on ‘value’. For example, the Incline Riesling by Selbach from the Mosel caught the eye and is a steal at £13.95.

“There’s either going cheaper or there is the ‘less is more’ approach, which is probably what our customers are more inclined to do,” said Felstead.

“What we are more focused on here at Berry Bros is to try and find wines that could be worth collecting, so for that, when you come to value, it’s more about wines that overdeliver at that price point, regardless of what the price point is,” she added.

The wines of Joey Tensley, another new addition to the portfolio, certainly overdeliver on price. His ‘Fundamental’ range of elegant and delicious wines represents outstanding value (£23) from Santa Barbara.

Domain du Gringet:

2019 Savoie, Gringet, Les Perles du Mont-Blanc, Brut, Domaine du Gringet £31

2020 Eponyme, Gringet, Savoie, Domiane du Gringet £38

2020 Monsieur Gringet, Gringet, Savoie, Domaine du Gringet £56

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