Provençal wine is a lot like pop music, if you think about it correctly. They’re both big tents that include stuff you’re fine to encounter at a wedding once you’re already loaded –Whispering Angel, The Electric Slide – but also, thankfully, includes standout works that make you feel like all your blood has been replaced by happy groove particles, like this song and, of course, the subject of today’s offer, Domaine de la Realtiere. From their estate, Pierre and Slyvia Michelland makes some of the most thoughtful and truly lovely biodynamic Provençal wines we’ve ever tasted, harmonious, fun and effortlessly drinkable bottles that just as easily reward you for geeking out as they do for guzzling them down.

The estate itself is small – just 12 ha of limestone soil covered in clay, which makes it a postage stamp in Provence, where bigger and better and seem completely in lockstep. It’s perched 450 meters up in the hills to the west of the town of Rians and north of the Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence in an area named, by virtue of the hot summers and freezing winters, “little Siberia.” Surrounding the vineyards are not only the requisite olive trees, but actual wild forests, which not only mollify the extreme weathers but help build the tense mineral spine of the rose, in particular. This is, of course, critically important as the $10,000 question for a Provençal vigneron is, “is the rose any good?” Thankfully, these are among the best we’ve ever tasted; honest and true to the appellation, but orders of magnitude better than most.

When speaking to fans of the domaine (hello fellow nerds!) the number one sentiment that gets expressed is “why the hell isn’t everyone in Provence making wines like this?” This is, of course, beyond the remit of this sales pitch to address. Certainly, Pierre and Sylvia think the answer is easy: they’re those type of “wine is made in the vineyard” chad-vignerons that just radiate calm and poise, and, well, their vines are superlative. They’ve got a point – the vineyards are stunning; dry farmed, gobelet trained and tough: they’ve been organic since Pierre’s father’s days in the early 1990s and demeter-certified biodynamic since 2011. The estate’s focus is solidly on ancient and local varieties – Ugni Blanc, Carignan, Cinsault, Grenache and Syrah, but there’s a few surprises as well, including a Carignan Blanc parcel that’s pushing 100 years old and some new experimental plantings of Nebbiolo that seem poised to make a lot of people very happy and very very confused in a few years.

Following the farming, the winemaking is just a process of getting out of the way of the vines, a collection of thousands of small good decisions that make excellent wine that tastes like the rugged landscape that shaped it. The wine’s already done at harvest – it’s just their job to transmit it faithfully to bottle. The reds often see some carbonic maceration to ward off Carignan’s reductive tendencies, the white varieties are blended to build tension, the rose each year emerges from tank like the Aphrodite of Cinsault, poised and beautiful and incredibly simply attired. The pair make no additions during winemaking and a small dose of SO2, generally around 20ppm, is added at bottling. It sounds easy, but, well, no one else seems to be half as good at it.