The 2013 and 2012 Northern Rhône Wines

Northern Rhône fans will find two very different vintages in 2013 and 2012. A cool growing season and late harvest yielded nervy, edgy wines in 2013, while warmer, drier conditions in 2012 resulted in supple, forward reds and whites that will drink well upon release.

A Contemporary Perspective

It's hard to believe that not so many years ago most northern Rhône wines, aside from tiny-production items and bottles from a handful of cult producers, were languishing on retail shelves, in restaurants' cellars and on wholesalers' close-out lists. With the exception of a handful of well-known wines such as Guigal's single-vineyard Côte-Rôties, Chave’s Hermitage and Jaboulet's Hermitage La Chapelle, these were pretty serious insider wines. Chapoutier's quality turnaround had kicked into gear, the situation at Delas had greatly improved, and producers such as Clape, Jamet, Ogier and Rostaing had built solid reputations and loyal followings, but after that the bottom dropped precipitously.

Fast forward to the here and now and things have been turned completely on their head. The asking prices for wines from Jamet and Chave have gone through the roof, and bottles from extinct northern Rhône domaines like Gentaz-Dervieux, Raymond Trollat and Noël Verset are regularly commanding up to a thousand dollars, and that’s if you’re even able to find them in the secondary market. That’s quite a change from the late 1980s, when I first started visiting these growers.

Part of the Clape family's library of old Cornas

While there’s no single dominant reason for this dramatic and relatively recent turn of events, I have no doubt that a major factor is the even more extreme upswing in prices for small-production Burgundies, which themselves leapt up in response to skyrocketing tariffs for collectible Bordeaux. In the hearts and minds of most of the world's most serious and deep-pocketed wine collectors France still rules, and, historically, the regions that most wine buyers have regarded as France's big dogs are Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhône Valley, the north in particular.

The northern Rhône's historic reputation as one of the world's premier wine-producing regions is largely attributable to the fame of Hermitage, whose red wines in particular have been highly collectible for literally centuries. It's hard to find a book or article on the wines of the Rhône that doesn't retell the story of Thomas Jefferson visiting Hermitage in 1787 and declaring its white wine "the first wine in the world without exception" (look, it just happened again!). And Pliny the Elder's writing on the wines of Vienne (i.e., Côte-Rôtie) in 71 A.D. have been quoted for generations as well. So it's not as if the region came out of nowhere, like many hot winegrowing areas that emerged on the scene in the second half of the 20th century.