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If any vineyard in France deserves its own appellation, it might be the Bourguignon family’s Laroque D’Antan. To cut a very long story short, in 2005, France’s foremost soil scientists, Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, discovered the ruins of an ancient vineyard in the small commune of Laroque-des-Arcs, just five kilometres from Cahors. At the time, this forgotten limestone terroir—likely abandoned following the 1870s phylloxera wave—was almost entirely obscured by forest. Over the following years, the Bourguignon family meticulously restored the vineyard and its terraces—root and branch.
Between 2012 and today, the family completed several field grafting campaigns—a far more physical and time-consuming process than the common bench-grafting technique. While the lower terraces are devoted to red varieties, the whites are on the upper limestone causse, comprised of massale selection Sauvignon Blanc sourced from Cotat and Dagueneau, Sauvignon Gris, and two varieties from Domaine Plageoles in Gaillac, Mauzac and Verdanel.
A vineyard as strikingly singular as Laroque D’Antan deserves a wine worthy of flying its flag, and this is precisely what the domaine has given us. The cooler 2021 vintage delivered a succulent, spring-loaded white with scents of iodine and meadow flowers alongside crystalised flavours of yellow stone fruits and honeycomb: all encased in a long, satiny structure. Utterly unique and utterly delicious. Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Genius hits a target no one else can see.” The Bourguignon family have hit the bullseye.