Tempier & Ott Are Jealous.
Pradeaux Perfected Bandol 200 Years Before Them.

Dear Artisans,

Every Summer I ask Kermit Lynch for our allocation of Domaine Tempier Rose, and every Summer I brace a little. This year the answer came back after a suitably dramatic pause.

Twelve bottles.

Twelve. For the year. I have one customer who takes four cases of Bandol rose a year and considers that a lean season — and I had to call him and explain that I could offer him one bottle of it. That was not the highlight of my June.

They sold out the moment I put them online, obviously.

None of this is anybody’s fault. Word got out about Bandol, the world discovered that Mourvedre makes rose with actual structure, and the appellation is small — that is how a bottle ends up at seventy dollars and still gone by lunchtime. Tempier and Ott are both magnificent and I will sell you either one the second I can get them.

But I am still not a three Michelin star restaurant, and the allocations reflect it. So I did what I always do, which is let you in on Sommelier's best-kept secrets.

A secret hiding in plain sight, about ten minutes down the coast.

Chateau Pradeaux has been in the Portalis family since 1752. The man who inherited it, Jean-Marie-Etienne Portalis, went on to help draft the Napoleonic Code, which I mention only because it is the single most French sentence I have ever typed. The estate sits at Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, right on the Mediterranean between Toulon and Marseille. It survived the Revolution, then phylloxera, then was dragged back to life during the Second World War by Suzanne Portalis and her daughter Arlette. Cyrille Portalis runs it now, with his wife and two sons.

For scale: Domaines Ott did not own a single vine in Bandol until 1956. Pradeaux had been farming this hillside for two hundred and four years by then. I am not running anybody down — Ott and Tempier make wonderful wine and deserve every bit of their reputation. I am pointing out that the oldest hand in the room is also, right now, the one nobody is fighting over. (Until now, oops.)

The reason Bandol rose is different from every other pink wine in France is Mourvedre, and the reason most people cannot make a serious one is also Mourvedre. It ripens late, it demands heat, and it gives you tannin and savour where other grapes give you strawberry candy. Pradeaux runs seventy percent of it, off vines averaging thirty years, at a yield of twenty-seven hectolitres per hectare. That is a red-wine yield. Nobody farms that low for a wine people drink out of a plastic cup by a pool.

Direct press, cold settling, then fermentation with indigenous yeasts in cement and enamelled steel. No malolactic — the decision that keeps the acid upright and stops the whole thing turning soft. Eight weeks on fine lees for texture. Around twenty thousand bottles a year exist, for the entire planet.

In the glass it is closer to salmon and tangerine than to the pale pink everyone expects. Citrus, wild strawberry, crushed nectarine, Provencal herbs, and a saline mineral edge that reads as the sea because it more or less is. It is silken and round and then it finishes long and chalky and leaves your palate completely reset. It also ages, which is the part people never believe until they try a three-year-old bottle and find something closer to a light, fully mature red.

Three Roses That Will Ruin
Pool Rose For You

Chateau Musar Rose 2018

This is the one that breaks people. Musar only bottles a rose in years when the fruit cooperates, and when they do they treat it like white Burgundy: barrel fermented, nine months in one hundred percent new Nevers oak, then six more months resting in tank before it ever sees glass.

The grapes are Obaideh and Merwah, indigenous to the Lebanese mountains and thought to be cousins of Chardonnay and Semillon. The vines were planted between 1920 and 1947, sit at roughly fourteen hundred metres, and are still on their own roots — one of the very few vineyards left on earth that can say that. Yields run fifteen to twenty-five hectolitres per hectare off untrained bush vines.

Pale mandarin in the glass. Raspberry, tangerine, caramelised orange, a vanilla spine from the barrel and a savoury edge underneath it all. Serge Hochar built this as a tribute to the blended roses of Champagne and it drinks exactly like that promise: not a summer cooler, a wine.

Marine Layer "Carina" 2025

Named for the constellation that forms the hull of the Argo Navis, which sounds precious right up until you taste it. Eighty-five percent Pinot Noir off Marine Layer’s own vineyard in the Sebastopol Hills, fifteen percent Grenache from the southern end of the Sonoma Coast AVA.

Picked by hand at night and first light, whole clusters straight to press, juice chilled and settled overnight, then a very cool ten to twelve day ferment. Aged in stainless drums and neutral French oak, bottled unfined. It is a serious winemaking protocol applied to a category that usually gets whatever tank is free.

Rose gold in the glass. Cherry blossom and wild strawberry shortcake first, then watermelon rind and white nectarine turning up where nobody invited them, all of it strung along a bright acidity with a stony edge. Food & Wine put the Carina on their best roses of summer list, and honestly I would have gotten there without them.

La Spinetta "Il Rose di Casanova" 2025

Giorgio Rivetti does not sleep. He took on Barbaresco, then Barolo, then Tuscany, then sparkling wine, and somewhere along the way concluded that Provence had gotten away with quite enough.

Equal parts Sangiovese and Prugnolo Gentile off twenty-year-old vines at Terricciola, three hundred metres up on sandy soils full of ocean sediment, facing south. Destemmed and softly pressed, about an hour on skins, ten days fermenting, then three months on its lees in stainless steel and nothing else.

Floral and citrusy with Mediterranean scrub behind it, delicate in the middle and then genuinely mineral and mouthwatering on the finish. It is twenty-one ninety-nine — I am not entirely sure how, and I have stopped asking Giorgio to explain himself.

Two hundred and seventy-four years
of not chasing a trend.

The same family, the same hillside above the Mediterranean, seventy percent Mourvedre and a yield low enough to embarrass most red wine. A critic who tasted it wrote that it recalls the benchmark wines of Tempier — and I have no notes to add to that. Thirty-two ninety-nine, and unlike almost everything else in Bandol this summer, you can actually have some. Buy three. Drink one now, and forget the other two until 2027.

Sante,

— James Tran

Call 650-917-8080, text 650-880-3553, email sales@artisan.wine, or chat with us