Domaine Alain Graillot

Alain Graillot did not come to wine through inheritance but through renunciation. He trained as an electrochemical engineer and spent the first half of his life working for international pharmaceutical companies —Roussel-Uclaf among them— with postings in Guatemala and Costa Rica. In 1985 he left a career in agrochemicals and started from scratch with a rented plot on the site of a former pig farm, on the Chassis plateau, between Tain-l'Hermitage and Pont-de-l'Isère.

From there he became the name that put Crozes-Hermitage on the map of the great Syrahs of the Northern Rhône. He died at seventy-seven.

The domaine today is eighteen hectares of Syrah and two of Marsanne and Roussanne, planted in a ratio of eighty to twenty. In vintages that allow it there is also a denser, longer-lived cuvée, La Guiraude. The house is run by his son Maxime, who joined in 2008 after taking his oenology diploma in Dijon, alongside his brother Antoine.