Catastrophe struck out of nowhere in 2012. A devastating hailstorm (Fr. “grêle”) destroyed Château de Roquefort’s entire red wine harvest. Anyone else would have been in pieces, but not Raimond de Villeneuve. He rallied all his friends and thirty of the nation’s top growers shared their best grapes with him. Raimond used them to make a one-of-a-kind cuvée, which he named Le Grêle, and that was the end of the crisis.
The Le Grêle label features the stamps and signatures of the thirty produces that got together to for a group photo to celebrate this most unlikely of successes.
