Élisabeth's family has been established in Sommières, between Nîmes and Montpellier, since her grandmother bought the estate in 1937. François Jourdan, raised in Burgundy and trained at the Clos de Malte in Santenay, married into the family and joined Élisabeth in 1983, and together they work an unusually high proportion of old vines (Cinsault planted in 1969 among them) on silex soils, making an array of blessedly old-fashioned and unaffected wines exclusively from indigenous varieties. They make a special point of not releasing their wines until they consider them ready to drink, a resistance to the "latest vintage" syndrome that naturally endears them to us. But, more importantly, we were utterly convinced by the purity and restraint of L’Argentier’s style. Pioneers of the Languedoc's revival in the 1980s, they still offer something new and different within the region's wines.