2007 and 2006 Rhone Valley Wines

The refrain that I heard most often up and down the valley was that the winds of September ensured impeccably clean grapes and a healthy harvest. An extended growing season, with little in the way of heat spikes and capped off by moderating breezes and cool nights in September, allowed for the steady build-up of both grape sugars and skin maturity, yielding wines with balance and complexity. For the most part the 2007s feature abundant but not excessive alcohol levels. The charm of the vintage lies in great part with the seductive upfront appeal of the wines, but the best of them are built to last and improve in cool cellars.

Winos who prize immediate gratification will go nuts for the 2007s from the southern Rhône Valley, while those collectors who gravitate toward more classically styled wines that are slower to reveal themselves will be a bit more discriminating about the wines they buy. As for the question of whether 2007 is “the greatest vintage ever” in the south, I’m averse to such sweeping generalizations as a rule and think that such a proclamation discounts the consistent greatness of, for example, 2005 and 2001, two vintages that produced a wealth of outstanding wines. It’s a sounder policy, I think, to balance a cellar with a range of vintages, and I hope that IWC readers can resist the temptation to stack their cellars with 2007s at the expense of the elegant 2006s and 2004s and the powerful 2005s that are still available, in most cases at lower prices than the 2007s will command.

Meanwhile, the high-quality, classically structured 2006s appear poised to fade into immediate oblivion in the American market. Sandwiched as they are between the ’07s and ’05s, they are likely to be overlooked by cash-strapped American buyers. For smart consumers, there will probably be plenty of buying opportunities as the 2006s are dumped by importers, wholesalers and retailers in an effort to generate cash to pay for the soon-to-arrive, and hopefully easier-to-sell, 2007s. A similar fate befell most 2004s, which are proving, as a group, to be lovely wines, with plenty of short- to mid-term appeal but also the balance to reward extended cellaring.