2018 Château Le Devoy Martine Via Secreta Lirac 750 ml

Château le Devoy Martine’s broad, silky Via Secreta is one of the Rhône’s great bargains. A star from Lirac, a top appellation right next to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, their wines are rarely seen on American shores, except for chances like today.

Despite our love of the appellation, great Lirac can be devilishly hard to find on this side of the Atlantic—we’ve only been able to offer two in our entire history—which makes wines like the Via Secreta some of the ultimate Rhône-insider’s treasures.

Their 91- to 93-point 2018 shows off why Lirac is one of our go-to appellations for outstanding value when we’re drinking in France. It’s a bold, rich wine with the sumptuous fruit that we adore from the Rhône, but a price that reflects their under-the-radar status. Our team is eager to stock up, but when our CEO heard the rumblings around how many bottles we were planning to buy, he put a block on employee orders until after this send. 

Nobody knows how long it will be until we get to offer another Rhône blend like this one.

Located just across the river from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, le Devoy Martine’s soils are distinct in their increased proportion of clay and limestone, perfect for producing a wine with silky tannins and velvety texture. This makes their wines absolutely stellar for drinking young, while retaining the powerfully rich fruit that top appellations in the Southern Rhône are famous for.

That combination of intense fruit and a seductive texture is on prime display in this 2018. Aromas of roasted plums, succulent blackberries, black pepper, and lilac lead the charge, drawing you in for a sip, where the big payoff awaits. On the palate, the reward is immediate: a punch of dark fruit, accented by hints of fennel, wild rosemary, and a velvety, mouth-coating finish.

Veronique Lombardo, the owner and winemaker at le Devoy Martine, is a single-minded figure, whose obsession is translating the product of her immaculately farmed vineyards into the bottle with as little distortion as possible. That means fermenting each of the four grapes in this blend separately in concrete tanks for maximum purity, and then assembling the blend to best express the vintage.

The 2018 is dominated by Mourvèdre, the tricky-to-grow, dark-fruited secret weapon of the estate. It thrives in hot years like 2018, bringing a rich texture and distinct scents of wild scrubland to the blend. It’s rounded out with equal parts of Grenache, the classic grape of the Southern Rhône; Syrah, which is full of dark plums and pepper; and Cinsault, which keeps the whole blend fresh and elegant.

Once the blending is done, Veronique ages the wines in large concrete tanks, allowing a gentle amount of oxygen to soften the wine, while preserving the freshness and elegance that make it so delicious right now. The result is a bottle that’s got all the power of the best Southern Rhône wines, with a seductive, drink-now personality.