Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Tasting Notes:
93 points Wine Advocate
I was astonished by the freshness and lack of any oxidation in both the 1932 and 1925. Both wines exhibit light amber/rust colors, with no pink or ruby hues remaining. Both possess astonishing level of sweet, jammy strawberry/cherry fruit intertwined with plenty of spice. They are full-bodied, fleshy and expansive on the palate, with heady alcohol present but not intrusive. Considering their ages, these rarities are reasonably priced. This estate holds stocks of wine that are aged in foudre and tank for decades before being bottled. Vintages currently on the market range from 1922 to 1979. I tasted the 1925, 1932, and 1979. These wines, which come from the Languedoc-Roussillon appellation of Maury, are vins doux naturels. Made from very late harvested Grenache, these wines tip the scale at about 17%-18% alcohol. There is nothing quite like them, although there is an obvious tendency to compare them to a tawny port, but only youthful tawnies have this amount of fruit remaining.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Domaine de la Coume du Roy sits in the village of Maury, in the far north of Roussillon near the Spanish border, and dates to around 1850. Seven generations of the same family have held it since, one of the longest unbroken runs in the region, with Agnès de Volontat-Bachelet farming it today. The land here is steep black schist, dark enough that the village name is thought to derive from a word meaning black earth, and it is planted principally to Grenache in its noir, gris and blanc forms. Maury became an appellation in 1936 for vin doux naturel, a style made by adding grape spirit mid-ferment to arrest fermentation and leave the natural sweetness intact. What sets this domaine apart is what came next: rather than sell its wines young, the family laid casks down and left them, and its cellar now holds a working library of vintages stretching back well over a century.
This 1925 is drawn from that reserve, and at 101 years it is among the oldest wine anyone is likely to open. Tuilé is the tile-coloured, oxidative style, aged in oak under the Roussillon sun rather than sealed from air, and a century of that treatment concentrates everything: mahogany gone almost to walnut-stain at the rim, with dried fig, date, bitter orange, roasted coffee, cocoa and old cask wood, all carried on the deep rancio note the region prizes. Fruit has long since given way to spice, nut and caramel. Serve lightly chilled in a small glass with dark chocolate or aged hard cheese. Once opened, a bottle like this keeps for weeks.
Bottle Size:
500 mL
Storage History:
Always stored properly in a climate-controlled cellar.
Condition:
Perfect.
A late release from the domaine’s own cask reserve, bottled and labelled recently rather than in 1925. Red wax capsule intact and unbroken, with the domaine’s seal cleanly embossed at the crown and the green French excise stamp in place beneath it. Front and back labels clean, bright and fully legible with no tearing, staining or lifting. Fill level at the base of the neck. Glass clean throughout.
