At the very core of Xavier Vignon’s expertise lies a well-oiled machine combined with lashings of experience, practice and intuition. The art of blending fascinated him from an early age and, over the years, he has turned it into an art form, daring to try out new associations, transcending codes and offering new, innovative techniques.
Blending is the very cornerstone in the creation of a wine and the stage that determine’s the wine’s structure. Whether blending origins, parcels, soils, varietals and vintages… ‘It is at this point that everything is built and the work of art is shaped, in keeping with all of the factors that we have determined prior to that point’.
Xavier Vignon grants himself the freedom to which he is entitled, the freedom to experiment with vintages, to blend different vintages of the same appellation, the same cuvée. He keeps a stock of several past vintages which he uses in the same way as the ‘reserve wines’ of Champagne. The cuvée Réserve de Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a wine that pays homage to the ‘perpetual reserve’ in which several different vintages are blended together.