Jérôme Chastagnol is originally from Saint-Étienne, an industrial town famous for Les Verts soccer team, bicycle manufacturing, and just an hour south-west of Lyon. He’s not from a winemaking family but after a 15-year career working as an IT engineer in Lyon, Jérôme decided it was time for a change. So, without winemaking heritage, vines, or a cellar, but with passion, determination, and lots of winemaking friends, he threw himself into his new career.

It was important to find out exactly what winemaking was all about so before releasing his first vintage in 2018, he spent five years moving around the region working for some of the best in the business - Gramenon in the Rhône Valley, Oustric and Bock in the Ardèche, and Métras in the Beaujolais. He had a varied and full experience, with some grower/winemakers teaching him about vines and the harvest while others about the cellar and winemaking. He counts himself fortunate that for two of these periods, he was able to spend a full year at the domain shadowing the winemaker and seeing nature’s cycle from the point of view of one winery.

Armed with experience and his winemaking diploma, he finally settled in the Provençal village of La Garde-Adhémar at the northern tip of the southern Rhône Valley wine region and just a 10-minute drive to where he makes his wines in the Caves Cathédrales. He rents cellar space there from a winemaker friend in the underground tunnels of a former chalk quarry, dug into the hills overlooking the Rhône River to the west. The grapes, which are fully certified organic from the 2021 vintage, are grown by two friends in adjacent villages but Jérôme steps in with his team when he decides it’s time to handpick the grapes. He works with some young and some very old Grenache Noir, and “middle-aged” Syrah and Carignan Noir. His wines, four reds for now, are all fermented in fibreglass tanks. For each wine he allows the grapes to sit two to three weeks on the skins, with differences in the wines coming from the varietals, techniques such as millefeuille layering whole bunch and destemmed grapes, and ageing vessels.

From his light Grenache Début d’Abus, via the juicy Syrah Loustic, to the deep Tarabate blend, his wines can be frivolous and fruity, or rich and spicey but never too much and there’s always something that makes you want to go back for a tipple.