Domaine Peter Sichel Corbieres Vallee de Cucugnan 2018

One of the top voices in French wine chose Domaine Peter Sichel as their “Discovery of the Year 2025.” We knew we were onto something! Get this incredibly romantic 2018 red blend for over half of when you order six of more.

La Revue du Vin de France is France’s oldest and most serious wine magazine, and they recently gave their top annual honor to this tiny winery in the remote Vallée de Cucugnan. Need to hear more – or are you ready to snap up the last of our Domaine Peter Sichel? We can’t predict when exactly we’ll have another wine from them – their website looks to be sold out of everything, and “Discovery of the Year” solidifies them as a rising star.

This exquisite 2018 is 80% Grenache, 10% Syrah, 10% Carignan – all organically grown, the latter two fermented whole cluster. It’s a brooding and deeply moving harmony of purple sweet pea flowers, gleaming black and red berries, and a jammy Linzer cookie. Scrub brush, wild herbs, and cured meat notes evoke the magnificent limestone peaks teeming with rare plants and boars and bears. There’s a gentle grip and a dash of cardamom on the lip-lickingly sweet finish, perfectly encapsulating the rustic grace of this windy, high-altitude site near two medieval castles. There is much more than $30 worth of wine in the bottle! 

Only 120 people live in this enchanting corner of Corbières in the southern Languedoc, and five of them make up the winery’s team. Winemaker Alexander Sichel is the grandson of the winery’s namesake, Peter, who planted the original vineyard in the 1980s. Alexander is a shorts-and-T-shirt idealist from a well-known Bordeaux wine family. It was he who upgraded the project to something serious, tearing out underperforming vines and infusing the vineyards with biodynamic teas of nettle, chamomile, and the notorious Preparation 500 to work their practical magic on the soils.

He likes to note that France’s more famous wine regions owe much of their renown to being located along trade routes – which is not necessarily indicative of the most compelling terroir. We highly recommend you go off the beaten path for this treasure. We have it priced at $29.95 (down from $60 retail), but when you buy at least six bottles, we drop it all the way to just $24.95. You’ll want more, though, so invest in six or twelve.