2000 Crozes-Hermitage

In 2000, for the first time, Florent Viale carried out a green harvest in July, in order to aerate the vines and protect against rot. Then August was hot and dry, and September weather was clement, neither too hot nor too cold, allowing him to harvest very good raw materials. Still, he pointed out, grape sugars were more a function of the drying of the grapes than of real phenolic ripeness. He extended his total cuvaison by about a week, as the wines tasted better and better on their skins. "There wasn't a lot of stuff in the skins in '00, and I felt that the more I extracted, the more I got," he explained. Given this approach, I was relieved to find that the tannins were quite velvety, and the aromatics clean and precise.