Gaël Petit's Tavel from three sites: limestone scree at Les Vestides, deep sand at Manissy, rounded Rhône pebbles at Vallongue.
Tavel faces Châteauneuf-du-Pape across the Rhône and has been an appellation for rosé alone since 1936, one of the first AOCs. Its vineyards lie on three kinds of ground: flat white limestone stones called lauzes, sand and gravel, and rounded river stones known as galets roulés.
The domaine works all three. Les Vestides, in the amphitheatre of the Combe de Malaven, is lauzes over red clay and limestone, cool and north facing. The Vallon de Manissy is deep Pliocene sand. The Vallongue plateau, bordering Lirac, is an old Rhône terrace of galets roulés in sandy limestone.
The vines are gobelet-trained field blends of Grenache, Cinsault, Clairette and other varieties, averaging about sixty years old; the oldest parcels date from 1920.
The Petit-Roudil family's history in Tavel reaches back to 1572. Mireille Roudil's great-grandfather Aimé Roudil (1870 to 1938) re-established the domaine after phylloxera, led the Tavel growers' syndicate and helped draw the appellation's boundaries in the 1920s.
Gaël Petit took over from his mother in the early 1990s and runs the domaine with Mireille. He works each site on its own, with whole-bunch and semi-carbonic ferments on indigenous yeasts, in concrete and old oak, to make Tavel in its older, structured style for the table.