Villa Blanche Calmel & Joseph Chardonnay 2024

Sourced from one of Languedoc’s most fastidious and passionate partnerships, Calmel & Joseph, the 2024 Villa Blanche Chardonnay captures the real essence of this sun-drenched Mediterranean region - ripe, textural, generous, and properly French.

Laurent Calmel and Jérôme Joseph are pioneers of Languedoc-Roussillon, driven by a simple belief: this region deserves to sit alongside the great wine regions of France. Their own organically farmed property sits just outside the postcard-perfect city of Carcassonne, giving them a firm foothold in one of France’s most exciting wine regions.

And this Chardonnay is exactly the kind of bottle that proves their point.

One taste was all it took for our wine buyers to start looking at each other thinking, “hang on, this can’t be right.” It has the power, polish, and presence of a serious village Burgundy, not an humbly priced bottle from the south of France.

Villa Blanche has been fooling the experts for years, too. Over the last decade, it has won Gold six times at the prestigious Chardonnay du Monde in France, including for this very vintage. It has also been named one of the Top 10 Chardonnays in the world by the same judges, sitting alongside the kind of Burgundy and Champagne that usually requires a quiet word with your bank manager before you even think about opening a bottle.

In the glass, it’s pale yellow with a golden glint, bright, creamy and beautifully balanced. Think candied lemon, pineapple and apricot, with a little butter, coconut milk and caramel richness underneath. Fresh at first, then generous and textural, with toasted almond, honey and acacia flower notes rolling into a long, polished finish.

Looking for a new go-to Frenchy with a very good secret? This is the one.