2011 Châteauneuf-du-Pape

"Nobody can call the last few vintages here boring," Laurent Charvin told me in November, which he explained was "his way of saying that there's never been so much stress and work for so little wine." Like all of his colleagues, Charvin is alarmed by the ongoing issue of short to seemingly nonexistent grenache crops, courtesy of coulure, which he says "have had a huge financial impact" on growers and producers. "While Chateauneuf isn't suffering as much as Volnay, for example, it's going to be a huge problem if we don't get back to normal production soon. A small producer can only absorb so much yield loss." Charvin views 2011 as "a vintage in the line of 2008, 2006 and 2004, but with more fruit intensity than 2008 and probably 2006." It's a vintage to drink during its first decade, "but there isn't a huge hurry."

Laurent Charvin said that 2011 was "a crazy, crazy season, with the spring making us think that we'd have an early harvest and then we got late June and July and into August, which were cold and wet, making us wonder if we would ever get maturity." The hot and almost completely dry weather that came in August and stayed on through October "definitely helped to make up for the beginning and middle of the season," he told me, "but there was a lot of selection necessary to get concentration and especially to have grapes without rot."