2009 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Pure

Julien Barrot has scaled back the number of wines in his portfolio "to focus on quality over variety," so there is no longer a Fiancee bottling. "But who knows what will happen down the road, if the personality of the vintage and fruit suggests it's a good idea," he added. Barrot described 2010 as "a vintage that the growers loved because everything fell into place and there were no problems with the weather, or anything else, except for the low yields." Two thousand ten, he went on, was "a great, great year for mourvedre because it got completely ripe but stayed fresh, so there's excellent backbone to wines that have a lot of it." Two thousand nine, on the other hand, "was a year where you had to walk a line between too much ripeness and just enough. It wasn't '07 style but compared to 2010 it took a lot more work to make sure that the grapes didn't get too ripe."

There will only be two bottlings from 2008 because Julien Barrot decided to blend all of the juice that would normally make the Pure and Fiancee bottlings into his two entry-level wines. "I could have made a very nice Pure," he told me, "but I thought that it was more important to preserve the integrity of the Signature, which is our classic bottling." He also decided not to make a Fiancee from 2009 "because the yield, especially for the syrah, was very low and it made more sense to add it to the Signature and build that wine's structure." Barrot told me that he is feeling more and more comfortable with including stems in his fermentations and that the 2009 Pure was made with 80% whole clusters. He said that he loves the spice and perfume contributed by stems but doesn't want to get into a routine "because the vintage variations make that impossible. Stems were fine in 2009 and 2007 because we got lignification (drying and hardening of the stems), but if you aren't able to destem in a year like 2008, when there are lots of green, unlignified stems, you're going to have problems."