2018 Côte-Rôtie Fortis

Stéphane Montez represents the 10th generation of his family in Saint-Michel-sur-Rhône. Montez is a tireless farmer, winemaker and salesman, producing a wide range of outstanding wines from his family’s 34 hectares across the Northern Rhône. Montez is planting a new, high-altitude site in Cornas, plus a new vineyard in Saint-Péray. Stéphane Montez lives on the winery property and accepts visitors and clients night and day, on Sundays and holidays, which is still quite rare in the region, or most of France, for that matter. This writer often visits him as early as 5:00 am and as late as 9:00 pm, depending on his schedule. These are highly expressive, cellar-worthy wines, which Montez acknowledges by releasing most of them a fair bit later than most of his colleagues.

It’s easy to compare 2019 and 2018, Stéphane Montez said, because “they were mostly hot and dry years, but 2018 gave a bigger crop and the fruit goes more red than dark.” That said, he’s impressed by the fresh character of that dark fruit in the 2019s, pointing out that “their energy and tannins are also not what you’d expect from a hot year.” He’s one of many producers I visited who imagine 2019 as “kind of a cross of 2009 and 2010 or, maybe better, 2015 and 2016, with structure but not too much, not hard, and there’s strong fruit expression.”