Alain Courrèges (left) and his son Gérard.
Located in the Taravu Valley, around 30km from Corsica’s capital city of Ajaccio, the 28-ha Domaine de Vaccelli was created in 1962 by Roger Courrèges, the current owner’s father. The elder Courrèges came to Corsica from Algeria, where his father and his grandfather were winemakers. The family was originally from near Béarn, which is part of the Pyrénées Atlantiques department in southwestern France.
Alain Courrèges took over the vineyard when his father died in an accident in 1974, replanting the vineyard with native Corsican grape varieties, primarily Sciaccerellu, a red-wine grape, and Vermentinu, a white-wine grape.
The granite rock seems to spill through the walls of the Domaine de Vaccelli cellar.
The vines are planted on southeast-facing hillsides of decomposed granite soil, the primary soil type in the AOC Ajaccio area. Lacking the space to age his wine, he decided in 1990 to create a cellar to store his oak barrels. The only problem was a huge outcropping of granite that was in the way. A friend of his, he explained, telephoned him one day to tell him that a large earthmover, equipped with a pneumatic hammer, might be available to do the job. The equipment was supposed to be breaking up rocks in a nearby riverbed for use in the construction business, but the operator lacked the proper authorization certificates. While waiting for the certificates, he went to work on the Domaine de Vaccelli’s cellar. The heavy equipment, along with some dynamite, allowed Courrèges to create a superb underground cellar, carved out of granite.
One of Alain Courrèges's carvings in the cellar's granite rock.
Evidence of his other passion besides wine, sculpting rock and painting, is found throughout the cellar. Each niche and cellar wall has a small stone sculpture or painted piece of terracotta on display. Some are modernistic, while others look like they could have been done thousands of years ago. Coincidentally, the world-famous prehistoric site of Filitosa, home of one of the largest collections of statue-menhirs in Europe, is also located in the Taravu Valley, less than 30 minutes away from the vineyard.
In one of the more dimly lit corners of the estate’s cellar I spotted a meter-high menhir that would have fit right in with Filitosa’s granite Neolithic warriors. He told me about a representative of one of the French ministries, who happened to visit the cellar after tasting some of their wine in the tasting room that is located in an adjacent building. The man became extremely excited, he remembered with a smile, when he saw one of Courrèges’s carvings on one of the cellar walls. Not aware, evidently, that the cellar dated from 1990 and not 1990 B.C., the man wanted to telephone the French Ministry of Culture to tell them that he had located a new Filitosa.
Since 2000, Courrèges’s son, Gérard, has been vinifying the estate’s wine. Courrèges junior has four years of wine studies behind him: two in Bastia, in the northern part of the island, and two in Nîmes, in southern France. The elder Courrèges is self-taught, both in winemaking and in sculpting and painting. Before taking over the vineyard, he worked in a technical position for a construction company in Ajaccio.
The Domaine de Vaccelli makes two different white and red wines. The Blanc Tradition, which is 100% Vermentinu, is a well-balanced, fruity white wine with traces of mineral flavors. The red, the Rouge Tradition, has traces of cherries and is slightly spicy. These are good, solid wines that reflect the honest, hard-working character of the estate’s winemakers. They go well with the local, Corsican cuisine; the white would be a good choice to accompany any of the shellfish or fish from the Mediterranean Sea and the red would be excellent with a plate of Corsican charcuterie.
The Roger Courrèges cuvée, named for the elder Courrèges’s late father, is a much more refined and complex wine. The grapes for the white and red Roger Courrèges wines, like all of the grapes on the estate, are hand harvested. Those used in this haut-de-gamme wine are taken from select parcels on the estate, and, following fermentation in stainless-steel tanks, the wine is placed in oak barrels to age. The Blanc Roger Courrèges is a clear yellow in color, with discrete vanilla aromas and a delicate floral flavor. It has pleasant peppery, mineral notes. White Corsican wines are rarely exposed to oak, but this wine shows that the Vermentinu grape is capable of producing complex and balanced wines.
Likewise, the Rouge Roger Courrèges red is well balanced, with an amazingly incandescent ruby color. It has strong herbal notes of the aromatic wild plants that cover much of the island, the maquis that Napoleon said he could smell while in exile on the island of Elba, some 50 miles to the east. That smell, it was said, brought tears to his eyes.
Alain Courrèges demonstrates his artistic abilities on a bottle of Rouge Roger Courrèges. Customers can purchase custom-engraved bottles of Domaine de Vaccelli wine.
The distinctive label of these wines, with a black-and-white image of the dark-eyed, strong-jawed founder of Domaine de Vaccelli, Roger Courrèges, says that this could only be a Corsican wine. The red version marries perfectly with a roasted leg of lamb, and will even stand up to a Civet de sanglier made from one of the island’s wild boars, the meat marinated in wine and vinegar laced with juniper, cloves and mashed garlic, and cooked with a generous helping of root vegetables.
The Courrèges family may not be native to the island of Corsica, but they and their wine seem to be of it.
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I enjoyed this article. It is amazing to see that granite, and the sculpting. I wish that we could get these wines in the United States.