2019 Le Roc des Anges L'Effet Papillon Rouge IGP Cotes Catalanes 750 ml

Not long after Stephane and Marjorie Gallet hung up their winemaking shingle outside a small cellar in the stark, windswept village of Montner, Marjorie traveled to Paris with a dozen sample bottles. A week later, she returned to the Roussillon, having landed feature wine list placements at a handful of Michelin three-star restaurants—placements Le Roc des Anges would never relinquish.

If it’s the Gallets’ savory Vigne Centenaire, Reliefs, and Segna de Cor bottlings that have continued to impress Parisien sommeliers, it’s the couple’s luscious, high-toned l’Effet Papillon Côtes Catalanes that has wowed the well-heeled clientele of French brasseries from the Left Bank to Soho. 

The just-released 2019 l’Effet Papillon, from a vintage that won’t soon be forgotten in the South of France, ranks among the most delicious and drinkable reds of the year. A blend of darkly concentrated, small-berry, old-vine Grenache and highly aromatic white-pepper Syrah, this is what eminently quaffable under-$20 French reds used to be, but so rarely are today. 

The story of Roc des Anges, Stephane and Marjorie Gallets’ superstar estate in the Roussillon, is one of France’s most riveting. Beginning in 2008, armed with diplomas from the prestigious school of agronomy in Montpellier and dozens of loans from friends and family, the couple sought out a patchwork of spindly, head-trained ancient vine Carignane, Grenache, and Mourvèdre plots on the wind-swept hillsides around the tiny hamlet of Montner. 

Just a few years later, Marjorie booked a second-class seat on the TGV from Perpignan to Paris. When she returned, her wine was on the list at several Parisien Michelin-starred restaurants, including three-star Guy Savoy, Le Pré Catalan, and Le Crillon.

The only way to fully understand what makes the world-class reds of Roc des Anges so remarkable is to do as we did, and hop on that same TGV, from the Gare de Lyon headed due south. Once you arrive in Perpignan, you drive north out of town, slaloming through the hills, past the whitewashed villages that seem lost in time. When you get to Montner, you pass the house where the Gallets lived until 2014, before building a modern house and state-of-the-art cellar on the sun-drenched plains outside of Latour de France—a cellar where some of the most sumptuous and savory reds in the world ferment slowly with almost no winemaking intervention. 

Drawn from those small, free-standing Grenache vines in the hills above Montner, and a smaller percentage of low pH, white-pepper Syrah, the 2019 l’Effet Papillon is as delicious as it is quaffable—a meticulously crafted red, fashioned by one of the most extraordinary winemaking couples in France.