Saint-Michel-sur-Rhône, Saint-Joseph & Condrieu, France
On Syrah, Marsanne, Viognier, and Happiness.
It is with immense excitement we introduce François Villard to our portfolio. Never have I encountered a Villard wine without a rush of excitement. These are the kinds of wines you reach for when you’re meeting with your most adoring Wine Friends, when you know there’s no margin for error. That’s because they offer equal parts epicurean pleasure and imaginative capture, every time.
François Villard is a bundle of joyful energy. He is a first generation, self-made vigneron who while training to become a chef fell head over heels for wine. After transferring his studies to become a sommelier, he soon took a leap of faith and gave his life to farming. He is one of the rare few quixotic souls to find such success. A true rockstar for the Northern Rhône.
When you speak with him, François’s passion for wine as artbubbles from his voice. Through his broad, Buddha’s smile, he shares the stories and philosophies behind his life’s work: How in 1989, still in his early 20’s, he took to the land, settling in Saint-Michel-sur-Rhône, a commune listed in the cahiers de charges for both Saint-Joseph & Condrieu. At the time, Condrieu was a truly underground appellation. He and his friends Yves Cuilleron and Pierre Gaillard working in the footsteps of the late great Georges Vernay who kept Condrieu from extinction, the three of them re-planting this nearly forgotten Viognier variety throughout this, its oldest and finest terroir on the precious granites, schists, and gneiss soils of the upper Rhône's right bank. What began as those few rows of Viognier were joined by Marsanne and Roussanne and Syrah gradually blossomed into the Domaine we see today. All this he relates to me with an infectious happiness. It is recognizable as that same Happiness that jumps from every glass of his 24 (!!!) different cuvées. I think this is what really sets François's wines apart. Truly, as much as I adore the wines of the Northern Rhône, we all know how often these are brooding wines, how often something brow-knitting and pensive is a’lurk. But Villard’s wines are different… more ecstatic, more rhapsody, more jubilance!
Over these last 36 years, François developed a signature style: that of opulence and lusciousness and generosity of fruit, brought into ever greater structural balance year by year.
Today, Domaine François Villard has grown to encompass 42 hectares of vines spanning every Northern Rhône appellation (with the conspicuous exception of Hermitage—maybe one day!?). In fact cuvées like François's Les Contours and (even more importantly) Seul en Scène are themselves advocates for the overlooked terroirs on their long journey from generic IGP to full-on appellation status. It’s that groundbreaking spirit that’s powered this vigneron's narrative arc since the beginning. François witnessed how, through their hard work and TLC, the terroirs of Condrieu and Saint-Joseph could be re-evaluated by wine lovers on their own intrinsic strengths and graduate from back-benchers to the widespread acclaim they enjoy today. As of late, his efforts in Saint-Péray have helped to finally get that terroir into the conversation. Villard’s Version & Version Longue are now considered benchmarks of this re-emergent AOC.
It’s such a privilege to bring these unique, story-telling wines to Alberta for all our friends to enjoy.
I have a hard time thinking of a northern Rhône producer whose wine has evolved as dramatically and positively over the last two decades than those of François Villard. Upon launching his domaine in 1989, Villard quickly built a reputation for producing assertively perfumed and flavored, opulent, even flamboyant wines, often with plenty of new oak influence, as was the fashion in the region at the time. But over the years his style evolved, especially during the last decade. Today his wines, which are often made with a significant amount of whole clusters and almost always a minimal use of new oak, are distinctly in the elegant camp of northern Rhône wines. That’s not to say that his wines are restrained, a point that he readily acknowledges. “You can get intensity of flavor without weight, too much ripeness and too much oak,” he told me. “It isn’t as easy and it takes a lot of work in farming, selection and attention in the cellar but it’s worth it. Plus, the wines age better when they are balanced and not monsters.”
—Vinous, July 2019.
Readers familiar with Villard’s recent moves toward making wines that favor elegance over richness will notice that in the hot 2018 and 2017s vintages he has pulled off the neat trick of capturing the opulence of the fruit while retaining energy. If anything, I might be more impressed by the progress that he has made with his white wines over that past decade than his reds, which are still consistently superb, by the way.
— Josh Raynolds, Vinous
