Visiting Le Casot des Mailloles

Having been blown away by the bottle of El Nino I tasted at Hibiscus a couple of months ago I was particularly keen to visit its producers Alain Castex and Ghislaine Magnier of Le Casot des Mailloles when we were down in Collioure last week.

They produce their wine from a tiny chai in the backstreets of Banyuls, just up the road from the natural wine bar El Xadic del Mar and are the real deal. Completely natural. No sulphites.

It made the 2010s we were tasting quite hard to read at this early stage (the current releases tend to be 3-4 years older than this) but there was a live quality about them and an intensity to the underlying fruit that gave you a sense of the experience to come.

The easiest to appreciate was a wonderfully fragrant bottle of El Nino 2010 which had been open 2 days - a blend of Carignan, Grenache Gris and Syrah. We immediately thought of the food we’d like to eat with it - a grilled Gloucester Old Spot pork chop, lamb and beans, veal or Camembert Fermier . . . it's a wine that makes you hungry.

The next three wines were still in tank or cask:

Soula 2010 - 100% Grenache Noir. Still quite funky - almost cheesy - but lovely wild plummy fruit. What Castex described as a microvinification.

Visinum - Syrah, Grenache and Carignan with lipsmacking syrah spiciness. Slightly cidery on the nose but spread out like a peacock’s tail in the glass. Very warming.

Le Poudre d’Escampette - Grenache Noir, Carignan and Mourvèdre (from round Lac Canigou). Very lush and exotic - the Mourvèdre, one of my favourite grapes, dominated.

We also tasted their Blanc du Casot 2009, a rich creamy white with touch of caramelised apple peel, apple pie spices and just a hint of petillance. 60% Grenache Gris, 30% Grenache Blanc and another 10% of assorted varieties like Carignan Blanc, Marsanne and Roussanne, which had been planted the traditional way all together.

Having been refused an AOC twice they now don’t bother and simply label their wines vin de table.


We’d been advised to go up to the vineyards if we got the opportunity and fortunately the rainy weather that day broke long enough to drive up there They’re up on vertiginous schistous slopes above the town which they work themselves with a traditional pick called a Xadic.


Everything has to be worked by hand which means they do most of the work themselves. "A lot of people feel that manual work like that is beneath them but for biodynamics you to have contact with the earth" says Castex. “If you drop a cows horn by helicopter there’s not much point, is there?”. Indeed there isn't.




The wines are distributed in the UK by Dynamic Vines.

El Xadic del Mar: a gem of a natural wine bar

On the face of it the back streets of the small town of Banyuls-sur-Mer seems an unlikely location for a natural wine bar but given that Roussillon has more than its fair share of natural winemakers, one of the most renowned of which, Casot des Mailloles, is just up the road, it’s not so surprising.

El Xadic del Mar was opened a year ago by Emmanuel aka ‘Manu’ Desclaux who used to run Le Verre Volé in Paris and has an exemplary selection of local wines and natural wines from further afield.

We stopped by for lunch before our visit to Casot des Mailloles (of which more later) and had a couple of interesting whites - Domaine Yoyo’s Restaké 2010 and Bruno Duchêne’s Val Pompo, both Grenache Gris . . .


. . . and some inventive plates of tapas including calcots and anchovies (of course, in this part of the world) and marinated mackerel with asparagus.


Desclaux’ view is that the Parisien wine bar scene has lost touch with its roots - that places that started as bars have become fully fledged restaurants. Well this is thoroughly unpretentious and a great place to drink natural wine.

El Xadic del Mar is at 11, av. du Puig-del-Mas, Banyuls Sur Mer (66650)
TÉL : + 33 4 68 88 89 20

Just because a wine is natural doesn't mean it's good

I've noticed that some people get quite aggressive when you say you like natural wine. What they tend to do is to think of the most bizarre example they've come across - if indeed they've tasted any - and conclude that you have no taste. But of course there are good and bad natural wines - or at least wines that appeal more or less to one's personal palate - just as there are with conventionally made wines.

So here, for the record, is one that didn't do it for me: Le P’tit Scarabée 2009
from Isabelle Frère, in Sorède down in the Roussillon.

I wouldn't say it was bad, just unbalanced. It's a curious colour for a start - almost as pale as a Poulsard (though it's made from old Carignan, Grenache Gris and Syrah) and oddly sweet - a bit like drinking blackberry juice. It's not typical of other Roussillon wines I've tasted (which I tend to like) so it doesn't strike me as particularly expressive of the Roussillon terroir either.

I bought it from my local wine shop for about a tenner but it sells for more than that on everywine.co.uk where it's £99 for six bottles. So while not expensive, it doesn't strike me as particularly good value for money.

Could be that it hadn't been transported or stored in ideal conditions but I wasn't impressed. My husband on the other hand quite liked it so there you go . . .