2015 Côte-Rôtie Les Grandes Places

While Stéphane Montez’ entry-level Saint-Josephs consistently deliver solid, user-friendly value, his top-end bottlings of the last decade deserve to be placed alongside the very best examples of their appellations. Montez oversees 24 hectares of vines spread from Cornas up to Côte-Rôtie. His wines deliver a compelling blend of lush, forward fruit, depth and structure, all in fine balance. Two thousand sixteen gave him the material to make some of his strongest and most elegant wines yet. And don’t miss his finely wrought, mineral-driven white wines, especially the Condrieu bottlings.

There's a new vineyard-designated Côte-Rôtie bottling from Stéphane Montez, from the Bons Arréts lieu-dit at the southern end of the appellation, in Tupin-et-Semons. Fruit from this site has been part of Montez's Fortis bottling for some time, and he thinks the elegance it delivers now warrants a discrete, albeit small-production bottling of its own. It will come as no surprise that the 2015 vintage favors the house style here, which leans toward bold, full-flavored, fruit-driven wines that show well young. That said, I've found these wines showing a greater degree of finesse in recent vintages than a decade ago, and Montez admits that he is pursuing "greater elegance and less weight and richness" than he did as a young winemaker. That doesn't mean he's gone over to the wimpy wine camp, but northern Rhône wine lovers who might previously have passed over the wines from this 24-hectare domaine because of their large scale might want to check back in on them. Speaking of large-scale wines, when Montez had his 2015 Grandes Places analyzed, it registered 16.1 percent alcohol and dry. The lab was incredulous that his native yeast was capable of achieving that feat and asked him if they could isolate and commercialize it. He agreed, so there will soon be a yeast called "Montez" on the market.