2014 Saint-Joseph Le Passage

Stephan Ogier plowed almost all of his single-site Côte-Rôtie fruit into his two “classic” bottlings in 2014 because, like many of his neighbors, he felt that the yields were simply too low to justify making a minuscule number of bottles from those vineyards. Better, he thinks, “to try to make one or two really good wines and enough of them so that they can actually be found and people will drink them.” With the introduction of an entry-level wine, whose name is, for now, “Mon Village” but was “Le Village” before some bureaucratic hassles arose, Ogier is now positioning his classic Côte-Rôtie as a “semi-reserve” in the sense that there is now a stricter selection of fruit than before, and, most significantly, all of the young-vines fruit will now go into the Mon Village. Stephan told me that while his normal practice is to bottle after 18 months of aging in barrel, he opted for only 12 months for his ‘14s “to preserve freshness” and because he was wary of the wine’s relatively delicate (“like 2012”) structure and thus their ability to handle his normal oak-aging regimen. His 2013s are another story, with firm backbone and sharp focus if not great weight. Ogier called them “wines that will live a long time on their architecture and balance, not their richness, so completely classic.”

Now fully settled into his massive new winery at the southern end of Ampuis, Stéphane Ogier can handle his growing portfolio of wines far more efficiently than he could in his old cellar. (That facility, which is next to his parents' home on the west side of the railroad tracks smack in the middle of Ampuis, is now mostly used for equipment storage, but given Ogier's appetite for new vineyards, I suspect it will soon come in handy for bottle storage as well.) The Belle Hélène and Lancement bottlings will not be made in 2014, so severely low were the yields and strict selections in the vineyards and at the sorting table.