Château de Rhodes

About

Château de Rhodes wines have been organically farmed since 2008. Native grape varieties are used to produce quality wines in the purest Gaillac tradition.

The main objective of the Château de Rhodes team is to strive for ever-higher quality, based on the improvement of growing methods and winemaking techniques, while respecting traditions.

The vine, because it’s where it all comes from… The harmonious interaction of soil, location and climate is the basis for a quality product. Thanks to this exceptional terroir and the care taken in winemaking, Château de Rhodes is one of the benchmarks of the Gaillac appellation. Some of our vines are over 60 years old, the majority are between 20 and 30 years old, and we continue to plant quality plots of local grape varieties. The exposure is perfect: south-west, giving us ideal ripeness.

The vines have been farmed organically since 2008 for the reds, and since 2010 for the whites.
The first ‘organic’ wines are from the 2011 vintage, certified by ECOCERT SAS.

This means :
-no chemical weeding, but working the soil to aerate it and bring it back to life,
-no synthetic treatments, only natural products in controlled doses: copper, sulphur, essential oils, clays, ….
-No chemical fertilisers, just natural composts and seaweed to gently enrich the soil and give the vines the elements they need, when they need them.
Yields are kept under control by careful work on the vines: rational pruning, natural grass cover, careful removal of shoots and leaves. Harvesting takes place from the end of August, for the ancestral method, to the end of October for the sweet wine. Harvesting is either mechanical or manual, depending on the wine.

All our wines are vinified in the traditional way, in concrete vats coated with food-safe paint. Temperature variations are gentler than in other types of vat room. Since the 2011 harvest, we’ve been letting the indigenous yeasts work, the ones that are naturally present in the grapes and that will reveal the typicity of our terroir; we no longer work with selected yeasts. Fermentation is carried out at controlled temperatures.

Our red wines are matured in concrete vats for 1 to 2 years, before being bottled. They are then stored in an exceptional underground vaulted cellar, consisting of two bays of Toulouse brick measuring 40 m by 7 m. This means that bottled wines can be kept in excellent conditions, protected from light and sudden changes in temperature. This cellar enables us to market ‘mature’ red wines that are ready to drink!
We limit our inputs to the strict minimum: sulphur is added sparingly and is justified each time by an analysis, and fining – only when necessary – is carried out according to the needs of the wine. In order to respect the aromas and structure of our wines, in most cases we only filter once just before bottling. This explains the presence of a slight deposit at the bottom of some bottles, which has no effect on the quality of the wine.

Labels : Organic Farming (AB)

Spoken languages : German – English – French – Dutch

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