Domaine de Beudon L’Orage

This week’s Wine Crush is Domaine de Beudon L’Orage from Valais, Switzerland.

This week’s crush has us riding high. Like way-up-a-mountain sort of high, which is where you’ll find the grapes that go into this week’s crush: the Domaine de Beudon L’orage. The vineyards are perched 900 meters above sea level, halfway up a sheer mountainside in the Valais region of Switzerland. To get there, you can either climb steadily for 3 hours, holding on to rope railings as you wind your way up and up, or you can ride the vineyard’s charmingly rustic cable car. Either way, once you’re up, you’re way way up there— just you, the grapes, and the clouds— almost close enough to touch.  

L’orage is French for the storm, and this wine is a perfect example of making lemonade from lemons, or how sometimes you can make magic from a devastating year. After a serious storm took out most of winemaker Jacques Grange's hillside vineyards in 2015, he gathered all that survived—a bit of Pinot Noir, Gamay, Diolinoir, and Gamaret— and created the L’Orage. It’s a wine that wasn’t supposed to exist, and although the reason it does is every winemaker's worst nightmare, we’re thrilled we get to drink this experiment turned out-of-this-world red blend. 

Jacques converted the Domaine de Beudon estate to biodynamics in the 1970s (the first to do so in Switzerland), and though he has since passed away, his wife and daughters continue to adapt to the wildness of this region. The reds are picked and pressed on the mountainside, placed in steel tanks, and hauled down the mountain on steel cables to complete the fermentation. It’s the perfect blend of a special place with the tender force of Jaques’s spirit that makes this week’s crush unlike anything else we’ve tasted: vibrant fruit, wild strawberries and elderberries, as though they’ve been plucked, plant and all, from the earth still clinging to their roots. It’s a wild, light, and acidic red that you won’t be able to get out of your mind once you try it. With no added sulfur, it’s one to drink and share, or age and save for later.  Better yet, we recommend trying it both ways. And If you can’t find a friend to share it with, let us know, we’ll be right over.