Rhône season is upon us once more. This year heralds a particularly exciting new release – 2019 – a vintage being widely-lauded by producers up and down the Rhône Valley. Our full 2019 Rhône offer and Webinar will be launched at the end of this month, but to whet your appetite we are today offering the mightily impressive 2019s from Chateauneuf du Pape royalty – Château de Beaucastel.
Beaucastel owners, the Perrins, consider 2019 to be another in a line of ‘9s that “regularly mark the memory of winegrowers,” describing the vintage simply as “great.” Although the vintage looked to be a very early one at the outset, the hot and dry summer no doubt helped slow ripening down (particularly for Grenache) and, in the end, vintage was only slightly earlier than usual. At harvest time berries were ripe and concentrated and sanitary conditions were excellent. The result is a seriously intense set of wines, the Coudoulet being one of the most powerful we can ever remember tasting; whilst in Gigondas the huge viticultural strides the Perrins have made here have clearly been borne out in the 2019 Clos des Tourelles, the best they have made in our opinion. For Beaucastel itself, 2019 sees the return to a more typical blend, after the dominance of Mourvèdre in 2018. Typifying the vintage as a whole, this is a layered but immediately explosive wine bursting with fruit and spicy complexity.
Read MoreThe wines are abroad and will be shipped Autumn 2021.