Domaine Treloar Cotes du Roussillon Motus 2017

Treloar is a Celtic name, closely associated with Cornwall, where all manner of town names begin with the prefix Tre. It’s Jonathan Hesford’s wife Rachel’s family name. She was born in New Zealand and (to really confuse the issue) has Maori mixed up with her Celtic ancestry. Treloar’s logo is a reflection of that heritage. Jonathan himself comes from Yorkshire, England. At a young age, he became fascinated with wine, but worked in IT, a career that eventually took Rachel and him to Manhattan. They lived in Battery Park City, a block from the Twin Towers, and they witnessed everything on 9/11. They took their daughter and what they could carry from their apartment, lived day to day for the next month, and finally moved into a new apartment. The next day Jonathan was handed a pink slip by Merrill Lynch as part of a big lay off, which meant he lost his visa, as it was tied to his employment. So they took stock of their lives, of what was important. They moved to New Zealand, where Jonathan enrolled in an enology and viticulture program. Upon graduating at the top of his class, he committed himself to a life of agriculture. His first job was as assistant winemaker at Neudorf Vineyards. Two years later, in 2006, they decided to go off on their own, and move continents again to be closer to family, friends and potential customers. Jonathan had been following the renaissance happening with wine in Roussillon, a region profoundly rich in history with a great diversity of influences. They found an ancient domaine in the village of Trouillas, in an area known as Les Aspres, tight up against the Pyrenees. The area appealed because the soils were rich in clay (think water), plus it was in the path of the cooling and ripening-retarding Tramontane wind—both allowing for the possibility of more balanced and elegant wines than other hotter, more famous regions of Roussillon. From the start, they’ve aimed to make wine with little intervention. They focus on local varieties, work as organically as possible, using only organic fertilizers and no herbicides, and rely on superb fruit and smart decisions in the cellar to make authentic wines of Roussillon. Sulfur additions are minimum, there are no acid additions, and fining and filtration, if done at all (mostly confined to the whites), are altogether slight. The domaine has no permanent employees, no consultants; Jonathan and Rachel do pretty much everything themselves. They farm 25 acres of vines in nine parcels scattered about Trouillas, each within a nice walk from the winery. The vines are not irrigated, and the harvest is all by hand. What they aim for in their wines is precision and structure. Annual production is less than 3,000 cases.