2018 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places

A brand new, impressively spacious, gravity-fed cellar was installed at Domaine Clusel-Roch in time for this year’s harvest. Guillaume Clusel said that it would make work infinitely more efficient. It will also allow space for his own ever-growing project that is mainly based on wines from the Coteaux Lyonnais, which are getting ever more interesting, vintage after vintage. There are more domaine Côte-Rôtie bottlings now, and this new facility can easily accommodate the expanding production. Since taking over from his parents in 2014, Clusel has been moving the wines in a steadily more elegant direction without lacking depth, power and structure. These are extremely age-worthy wines that truly demand patience, especially the 2019s.

In Guillaume Clusel's view, “2019 might look more extroverted early than 2018, which has good acidity and, actually, solid structure.” By comparison the 2019s have plenty of underlying tannins but the fruit is more expressive and even fresher, he said, “and that hides the structure when the wines are young and can trick people into thinking that they won’t age.” In 2018 Clusel-Roch is introducing its first new lieu-dit bottling in some time, from Champon. Roughly 3,000 bottles will be made in a "typical" vintage, Guillaume told me. All of the 2018s here are scheduled to be bottled at the end of June 2020. One-third whole clusters are typically used here, across the board.