In the most clued-up wine bars and cavistes in Lyon, the endless requests for Pierre Gonon’s peerless St-Joseph are usually skilfully deflected towards wines like those of Domaine de L’Iserand. There, they feel a responsibility towards supporting new vignerons working hard to make great wines at fair prices. Not just as a commercial necessity but a moral and professional obligation to work with the most exciting new talent. You should too. It keeps the whole world spinning.

When it comes to a platonic ideal for Syrah, the appellation of St-Joseph comes closest to achieving perfection. No, it is not as statuesque as Hermitage or as complex as Cote Rotie. Neither is it as wild and brutal as Cornas. It is just balanced, cool, peppery Syrah that can be drunk earlier and with more enjoyment than the other great hillside wines. In comparison with an appellation like Cote-Rotie, there are many more growers working organically, traditionally, often with a horse without spraying tons of round-up about. Yes there is a large diversity of terroir, but the wines from the best spots deserve to be recognised as world-class cradles of Syrah.

When I first met John-Francois Malsert, or just Jef, in 2018, we’d only been chatting a few minutes when a truckful of horse manure reversed towards us. As he merrily told the driver where to dump it, I took a look around the modest, farmyard scenery of his new venture and I thought to myself, he’s got a lot of work on his hands.  But it seems like he eats le Weetabix, as the vines are getting healthier, the vinifications are getting more precise and the wines are rising to new heights.

His home turf is Secheras, in the generally less glamorous Northern part of the appellation. He has a meagre three hectares of Saint-Joseph in Ozon, Arras and Sécheras itself.

Before dedicating his life to growing grapes, he used to run the boisterous Carafe aux Foillies wine bar in Tournon, where he would regularly look to push the early vintages of Dard and Ribo and other low-intervention artisan winemakers. You suspect that in this environment, the virtues of drinkability were highly prized. Looking to the future and encouraged by local vignerons, he decided to rehabilitate the old vineyards of his grandfather, who like many locals, found the lean post-war years just impossible. To work traditionally on the slopes and make wine that sells for centimes, er, no thanks was the general thought in the 1950s.

Why here? It was the location of his grandfather’s old abandoned vineyards, set into steep slopes. Given he hadn’t the funds to pay for prime Mauves / Muzols real estate and knew his grandads wines had never seen any chemicals and could be restored to real quality, he could see how he could make this a success.

In the winery the goal is to work with whole bunches in the old school style, supplemented with a partial ageing in Spanish Amphores to round out the tannins. Production here is small, around 200-400 cases of each cuvee, but they’re well worth hunting down as they deliver a really arresting combination of traditional Rhone substance with something more energetic, a la Lapierre – You can see that he has been very influenced by the Dard & Ribo credo of making wines that last, but whose responsibility above all is to be delicious straight out of the bottle and shared with friends.

His time running a local wine bar, had given him some great connections to help with the early early years. He took some old vine cuttings from our friends the Debos family at Domaine de la Gouye and was helped along the way by stars like Herve Souhat who were really keen to promote his work.

Working with vineyards outside the prime catchment area and with relatively young vines, he knew he had to take on some serious graft to get the vines and the earth into the best possible condition. So, the horse-dung, organic and biodynamic viticulture and horse ploughing to keep the soil from being unduly impacted. These are measure that are neither easy, or cheap to implement, so hats off to one of the new-generation doing it properly and off their own back.

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