Rhone Annual Report: Beauty in the Glass

The main tasting room of Domaine du Pegau in Chateauneuf-du-Pape was occupied by a large group of visitors, so our Tasting Manager Kevin Davy and I tasted standing up in the winery office surrounded by desks piled with papers. I doubt that the workaday situation is how many of this winery’s fans around the world imagine a tasting here, but it took nothing away from the incredible wines.

The Domaine du Pegau Châteauneuf-du-Pape Cuvée Ella 2020 is a breathtakingly beautiful red wine with a very suave personality, plus perfect harmony in spite of an almost overwhelming fragrance and concentration. Sadly, there are only 600 bottles for sale and it is an unusually expensive wine for the region. It is also a radical stylistic innovation for a producer that usually majors in funky complexity.

For us the contrast between the beauty of the wine and the commonplace setting in which Kevin and I tasted it says everything about the biggest strength of the Rhone: how most of the region’s leading winemakers have great ambition but have kept their feet firmly on the ground. Yes, there’s some impressive new winery architecture in the region, but usually it’s all about the picture in your glass, not an elaborate gilded frame around it.

Our very last appointment at Domaine Pierre Gonon, far to the north in Mauves, in the St. Joseph appellation, hammered that point home. Jean Gonon, who runs the winery with his brother Pierre (both are the sons of the founder), came direct from the vineyards to receive us and was dressed in climbing boots and shorts. Those boots are essential to work in St. Joseph’s steep vineyards, where almost all the work has to be done by hand. We tasted with him down in the winery’s dark and wet cellar.

Gonon’s top wine is a St. Joseph without a single vineyard or cuvee name. St. Joseph is sometimes dismissed by wine geeks and somms as a second-tier appellation. However, the Pierre Gonon St. Joseph 2020 was simultaneously rich and enormously fresh; another breathtakingly beautiful picture with a simple frame.

It’s not by chance that I use two wines from the 2020 vintage as my first examples, because after tasting hundreds of 2020 Rhone wines last year, then again this year, it is now crystal clear that this is a great vintage for the region. The consistency of quality in 2020 is remarkable.

What makes 2020 stand out? Maxime Chapoutier, from the famous house of Chapoutier, put it most clearly: “The good acidity of the 2020 wines was the surprise of the vintage!"

Ripeness was not a problem in 2020 thanks to the hot and generally dry summer, but the freshness the acidity gives the wines is crucial, resulting in a lighter touch than the muscular and more firmly structured 2019s.

The M. Chapoutier Ermitage L’Ermite 2020 is in every sense a perfect example of this, with as much mountain freshness as concentration and underplayed power. Syrah doesn’t get better than this. However, this was just the most amazing wine of a truly spectacular tasting.

Some of our colleagues have complained that the Chapoutier wines are too oaky, but for us this is complete nonsense. Smoky aromas are part of the syrah grape’s special aromatic profile. The fascinating thing about this grape is the enormous range of aromas it is capable of and the way it can reflect terroir so well in the Northern Rhone: location, location, location!

Wonderful examples of this are the two top Hermitage wines from Delas, the super-elegant Delas Hermitage Lieu Dit Ligne de Crête Les Grandes Vignes 2020, with its extraordinary floral delicacy, and the powerful, rich and smoky Delas Hermitage Les Bessards 2020. They show how complex the geology of the Hermitage appellation is, although it comprises just 145 hectares.

While we were able to complete our picture of the 2020 vintage we also began serious exploration of the 2021 vintage. Despite traditionalist fans of the Rhone going on about their longing for “classic” vintages from cooler years, as happened in 2021, much of the wine media and trade hurried to damn the vintage, some dismissing it well before the harvest was completed. This is not how we roll and, after extensive tasting in the region, we’ve come to a very different conclusion.

Yes, there are some 2021 Rhone wines that lack some ripeness and depth, and there are some others (particularly in Chateauneuf-du-Pape) that suffer from overextraction, which was a strategy to try and compensate for the wines’ lack of power. However, there are also tons of very good and some excellent wines.

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Both the concentrated and aromatically complex Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape Hommage a Jacques Perrin 2021 and the structured, plush and fresh Isabel Ferrando Châteauneuf-du-Pape Colombis 2021 proved red wine greatness was possible in 2021. Thankfully, many producers took the risk, picked late and achieved high quality.

No less striking was the consistently impressive quality of the 2021 vintage wines from Paul Jaboulet Aine, one of the region’s powerhouses. Every wine that owner and winemaker Caroline Frey made is at least a very good example of its appellation and the Paul Jaboulet Aîné Hermitage La Chapelle 2021 is one of the masterpieces of the vintage.

The 2021 vintage also provided us with some wonderful discoveries, not least the wines from Domaine Vincent Paris in Cornas. Some of you will already know them, while for others they will be as new as they are to us. Small Rhone domains like this often have very patchy international distribution.

To those who say that Rhone wines have become too expensive in recent years we suggest you try the Domaine Vincent Paris Cornas Granit 60 Vieilles Vignes 2021, which has all the blackberry, smoke and pepper character we associate with this appellation, plus beautifully crafted tannins and a pristine finish. By the way, it’s a little-known fact that Cornas is the only appellation in the northern Rhone that must be 100 percent syrah! This is a complex region.

That’s why reliable producers with wide distribution like E. Guigal in Ampuis are so important. Today, as 20 and more years ago, they provide an easily accessible gateway into the region’s wines. As well as producing giants like the E. Guigal Côte-Rôtie La Turque 2019, which marries the stony personality of this rocky appellation with imposing body and structure, they also make millions of bottles of the E. Guigal Côtes-du-Rhône 2020, a generous and authentic expression of the region as a whole.

One problem that the region now suffers from is an increasingly wide consumer perception that the wines are all way too big and rich due to climate change. Sure, alcohol levels have come up quite a way during the 40 years that James Suckling and I have been following the region’s wines. However, there is now a tendency back toward lower alcoholic content.

Producers like Domaine Vincent Paris, Graeme & Julie Bott and Domaine Georges Vernay in the north are making wines with moderate alcoholic content and a wonderful vibrancy. The combination of the brilliance and excellent concentration of the Domaine Georges Vernay Côte-Rôtie Blonde du Seigneur 2020 is a wonderful example of this. It also shows what the young winemaker Emma Amsellem can do.

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In the south, pulling down alcohol levels is a bigger challenge, because the wines are usually dominated by the grenache grape, which a French professor of viticulture once described as, “a factory that produces sugar.” Sugar is turned into alcohol by fermentation, and grenache can top 15 percent.

However, it was interesting to hear that a number of top producers like Raymond Usseglio in Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Domaine Santa Duc in Gigondas had just planted counoise. The counoise grape rarely gives wines with more than 12.5 percent alcohol and has a fresh acidity.

We found an extraordinarily aromatic Chateauneuf-du-Pape – think flint, spiced bread and bitter chocolate – based on counoise that shows the effect of making this grape the largest component in the blend; in this case 27 percent. It is the Domaine de la Solitude Châteauneuf-du-Pape Vin de la Solitude 2020 that attempts to recreate the style of the region’s wines of two centuries and more ago when Vin de la Solitude was already widely exported.

No less revolutionary is the Raymond Usseglio & Fils Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc 2022, with its amazing freshness and mind-blowing purity of apricot and Amalfi lemon aromas. Here is a radical reinterpretation of the whites from this appellation that must be tasted to be believed!

We can already see a downside to the 2022 vintage in Chateauneuf-du-Pape due to the terrible hailstorm on Aug. 14. After our inspiring tasting of the 2020 vintage wines at Domaine du Vieux Telegraphe, chief winemaker Daniel Brunier turned very serious when he told us there would be no single-vineyard Chateauneufs – specifically from La Crau – from 2022 as a result.

What fell as hail in one place causing destruction fell elsewhere as rain that broke the terrible drought of the 2022 summer. This is the reality of winemaking: ambition and hard work in the vineyards are essential, but even in the 21^st century, nature always has the final say.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

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