“Insanely good value” from a groundbreaking, quality-obsessed producer
- 95 pts Decanter World Wine Awards95 pts DWWA
- Curated by unrivaled experts
- Choose your delivery date
- Temperature controlled shipping options
- Get credited back if a wine fails to impress
2022 Plaimont Echo Indigo Colombard & Sauvignon Cotes de Gascogne 750 ml
Retail: $24.99 | ||
| $15.99 | 36% off | per bottle |
- Curated by unrivaled experts
- Choose your delivery date
- Temperature controlled shipping options
- Get credited back if a wine fails to impress
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised—It’ll Be Bottled
What a difference four decades can make.
In the late 1970s, the vineyards of Gascony, in Southwestern France, were in a death spiral. Quality was low, and so prices were, too. Growers reacted by increasing their yields in search of reasonable income, which only hurt quality more and created more problems in the marketplace.
Enter André Debosc, a man described by British wine writer Lisse Garnett as “a beret-wearing revolutionary visionary, [Gascony’s] vinous Che Guevara.”
He realized the path forward was to focus on quality above everything else—but also that individual farmers were unlikely to be able to afford to do that over the short term. The result was the creation of the Plaimont co-op, named as a portmanteau of the villages of Plaisance, Aignan, and St. Mont.
Since then, they’ve “changed the face of southwest France,” according to Garnett, embarking on projects that would normally be associated with high-dollar wineries: They’ve created a registry of old vineyards and paid farmers to hold onto those sites—despite the fact that the EU would gladly pay for them to be ripped out for higher-yielding vines. Now, they’re using the vine material from those old sites, some of which were nearly forgotten grapes, to propagate massale selections in new plantings.
Their Echo Indigo wines bring that quality to bear in an affordable package. This is a thoroughly modern white wine that blends Colombard—the dominant grape of the region, known for producing soft, easygoing white wines with flavors of crunchy nectarine and lemon peels—with Sauvignon Blanc, which brings zip and citrus punch to the party.