2007 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places

Stephane Montez had just put the finishing touches on an enormous new chai when I visited him in mid-November, and by the looks of it he has increased his space five-fold. He's selling less and less wine to the negoce every year and the estate owns a lot of land, so he's getting set for the day when he is able to bottle all his production himself. He told me that 85% of his vineyards are in Saint-Joseph "and less than one kilometer from the winery, which makes things extremely efficient for harvesting and getting the grapes in quickly." Montez is thrilled with the quality of his 2009s, especially because he barely dodged a devastating hailstorm that swept through the area on the morning of August 28th. "It was horrible," he said. "We knew that it was coming and I was sitting on my tractor at the top of the hill, looking down on my vineyards and freaking out, watching the hail come closer. Then about five meters away from my first row of vines it just banked away and took off to the south. I didn't get a single hailstone. That afternoon I went to Mass."

Stephane Montez used three sorting tables for the 2008 harvest, including a top-of-the-line Vaucher-Beguet Mistral, which blows air across the end of the table to blast off any small, unripe grapes that were missed by earlier culling. "The best 2008s will be very feminine wines," Montez told me. "Most people will do a shorter elevage so you won't see wines of extraction and weight, and you should see fewer special cuvees as well. While 2008 was a nightmare for red wines, it came out well for the whites. They remind me a lot of the 1996s, with good acidity and energy." Montez is now using only roussanne for replanting in his white Saint-Joseph vineyards and the percentage of roussanne in his current wines is now up to almost one-third.

Stephane Montez likes the generosity of his 2006 wines and believes they are polished and precise, offering "very accurate expressions of their origins. " He describes 2007 as a vintage that was strongly marked by the winds in September, which allowed a steady maturity and stopped any heat spikes. Montez showed me a bottle of his 2006 Condrieu Les Grands Chaillees, which proved even better than last year, with intense spice and mineral character. He told me he likes Condrieu after a least a year in bottle but prefers to drink it before it's five years old and "absolutely not older than ten, because I love fruit. "