Madiran is one of those dependable wines that wine merchants like us love to have on hand. Whenever someone needs a deeply structured, full flavored red for their pot roast or steak night, there are very few wines in the world that offer as much substance on a budget as a proper Madiran. One of the very best is Christine Dupuy’s Labranche Laffont. When she took over the estate in 1993 she was the youngest woman winemaker in the appellation. It didn’t take long for her to replace those adjectives with “best”, with thoughtfully re-imagined wines. She improved farming and winemaking standards on her domaine, yielding grapes that had all the deep black fruit and earth of traditional Madiran, but with a much more elegance and restraint than the blocky, bruising wines of old. The 2021 offers aromas of blackberry pie, black soil and graphite, leading to flavors of vivid black berries and cherries, clay and herbs. The tannins are firm but velvety and balanced by food friendly acidity that lingers through the finish.