Seven Wines from Matassa, Ranked

Yesterday I went to Club Paris to taste through seven wines from Domaine Matassa, a Southern French producer whose tightly-allocated wines I am keenly aware of but not hyper-familiar with. These are wines that some people lose their mind over and others dismiss as being overhyped. When a wine producer reaches a certain stratum of popularity in the natural wine universe, the honest and meritorious concept of “house style” can warp into its evil twin “brand identity.” The wine becomes an Instagrammy status symbol and the inherently punk ethos of natural winemaking is perverted into something as regimented and exclusive as the classical winemaking it exists to subvert.

I used to argue that blind tasting was broey and pointless; grasping context and narrative were my favourite part of loving wine. Wine is alive and I want to interact with it honestly, so of course I will always have a soft spot for the poppy anecdotes and romantic details that garnish and amplify the liquid in the bottle. But lately I have been trying to focus strictly on the liquid.

My friends and I were in a gamesy mood and decided to rank the seven Matassa cuvées not from best to worst but rather from favourite to least-favourite, which is very different. The idea of ranking wines, or to be honest ranking anything, is reductive and absurd, but also fucking fun. I loved ranking these wines because it let me weave in and out of assessing the wines as mute objects and assessing my own highly colourful impressions of them. I feel like I now know these wines in a way that transcends my perception of “Matassa.”

My ranking is as follows:

7. Tattouine 2023 (Grenache Gris & Grenache Noir)

A pale red named after a fictional desert planet in Star Wars. Someone said it’s where Luke Skywalker was born but frankly I don’t care. My favourite part of this wine was saying the word Tattouine. It was suggested that it could be a cute name for a pet, two cat siblings, Tattouine and Ratatouille.

I did not like the wine’s nose at all. I thought it smelled straight-up yucky, bodily, like damp and slightly ripe human skin. The palate was faraway, like actual Tattouine, and tasted of very little.

6. Blanc 2023 (Grenache Gris & Macabeu)

This tasted decent at first— honest and farmy, like a pile of corn husks or a prairie girl’s long blond braid. Then it died in the glass and forced me to watch it die. The mousy finish crept into the mousy middle. Shades of brilliance flickered in and out. Like gnawing on a hunk of dried honeycomb as opposed to drizzling it fresh.

5. Olla Rouge 2023 (Grenache Noir, Grenache Gris & Macabeu)

From here on out, I liked all the wines.

The Olla Rouge gets a relatively low ranking because it was merely fine. If I ordered a glass at a wine bar, I would think “Yum” and enjoy it but for my second glass I would order something else not because it was bad but because life is broad and why limit yourself to something that is merely fine when you could gamble on greatness?

I don’t have any clever tasting notes. It was indistinct. It was red.

4. Rollaball 2022 (Mourvèdre & Carignan)

An electric and sassy but not too electric and sassy rosé that my friend who was also participating in the ranking rated as number one and I agreed that I would love to drink a bottle with her on a patio and would even love to drink a bottle with not her on a patio!

(Had I been looking at the bottle I may very well have been swayed by the Hello Nasty font. It’s so hard to be a free thinker!)

3. Cuvée Marguerite 2023 (Muscat d’Alexandria, Muscat de Petit Grains, etc)

I have a bias against aromatic whites and oranges because they’re unsubtle. People get really obsessed with this big ol floral style when they first get into wine because they’re easily identifiable and therefore a confidence booster for the beginner’s palate. It’s all perfectly fine, but the more experienced I get the more I find this style tends to coast on its own obviousness. However I was pleasantly surprised by Ms. Marguerite and had to hand it to her: she didn’t make me feel like I was drowning in a baroque pond of flowers. Nice acid and a touch of bitter citrus to cut. But I still feel like if she were a person she would talk about her trauma too much.

2. Brutal Orange 2023 (Macabeu)

The Brutal was light-hearted but still pithy. It had a tropical disposition that called the playful plastic juices of my childhood— CapriSun and Sunny Delight— to mind. I liked the way this bottle layered vibrancy with elegance, like if she were a person she would only bring up her trauma at the exact perfect moment, in a thoughtful and often inspiring way. She really came out the other side, you’d walk away thinking.

1. El Carner 2023 (Macabeu & Grenache Gris)

A red-white blend of the most dazzling hot pink. There is really no reason why this is Number One and the Brutal is Number Two except for, simply, I liked it better, which is sort of the whole point.

In wine I value focus over complexity, which is how I feel about writing and aesthetics as well. Well-executed minimalism can be never mistaken for simplicity, and the soaring crystralline clarity of El Carner’s strawberry/rhubarb palate was not unlike… drinking a ruby.