2011 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Pure

Julien Barrot has been focused on making only two bottlings for a few years now--Signature, which is a grenache-dominant blend, and Pure, his flagship wine, from the estate's oldest grenache vines in the Grande Pierre lieu-dit. The latter vines are now over 115 years old, making them some of the most ancient of the entire region. He admitted that he is naturally inclined to experiment and that it's hard for him to resist the temptation to do multiple cuvees, "but it's more important to maintain consistency and stability than to be all over the place, as fun as that might be." Barrot's sister Laetitia is now firmly in charge of administrative work at the family domain, which in France is a particularly onerous endeavor, and thus Julien has more time to devote to vineyard and cellar work. The result has been a subtle shift to more elegance in the Barroche wines, a conscious move that Julien attributes to stricter attention to retaining acidity in the grapes and to gentler extraction. That said, these are still wines that typically carry lofty alcohol levels. "Chateauneuf is considered elegant among wines of the south," Julien observed, "but even the most feminine Chateauneuf is always going to have power and weight, even in years like 2011, so working the wines too much can push them away from elegance."

Julien Barrot is now focusing on making two wines, Signature and Pure, with the option to make a Terroir bottling in weaker vintages, like 2008. Barrot is pleased with what he was able to accomplish in 2011, which he describes as a vintage "that is definitely about the grower and how much work they did in the vineyard. If you didn't watch your vines carefully they grew like wild." He told me that "after three straight low crops some producers decided to take advantage of the big potential yields in '11 and didn't green harvest enough and you can see it in the wines' dilution and weak mid-palate." As testimony to his confidence in the 2011 vintage Barrot did not make a Terroir in 2011 because "the fruit was strong enough not to need to do it."