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- Violette de Mireval rosé
I spent a lot of my youth driving between Bordeaux and the Midi - or Languedoc/ Roussillon if you want to be precise. Halfway between lies Toulouse, where I would stop and buy its red wine. Negrette is the local grape that’s adapted itself to the region’s conditions. It was always one of the red wines I bought. Until along comes this upstart American winemaker, called Nicole McPheeters.
And she’s the other half of the story. I met her when visiting our RedHeads Australia winery. She had just crawled out of a tank. And it showed. Drenched in wine. Not a good look for a girl’s first meeting with her boss, but she didn’t seem to care.
So, I asked how she’d got there. She told me her story, and I was impressed. Not half as impressed as our buyer and winemaker Mark Hoddy. He went and married her. But that’s another story, although it is relevant.
She comes from Arizona. Not a big wine producing state, though there are good wineries and young Nicole worked in one before deciding to do her Master’s in winemaking. However, the university wasn’t one conveniently located in the States, like Davis, California but in Adelaide, Australia. This showed she was smart - Australia is cutting edge - and ambitious. She did her 2-year course and qualified with top honours. We, Laithwaites, through our Australian winery RedHeads are close to the faculty, they know us well, and that we offer graduates not only very hands-on work and a chance to create something themselves but also a chance to work for our other operations in Europe. So, they sent us top-of-the-class Nicole and we stuck her in a tank to get wet and bedraggled. No better way to start; sorts the men and women from the boys and girls.
Nicole stuck it out, did her stint; then we said we needed her in Europe. She didn’t seem fazed…did a stint in our Bordeaux Chai OK winery, where she met Mark. When we moved Mark down to Pézenas to focus on Midi wines she went too. They got married despite the Covid lockdown and she, being still the independent sort, got a job in a winery near Toulouse.
