2012 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Pure

The Barroche vineyards lost over 65% of their Grenache fruit in 2013, Julien Barrot told me, "but the Mourvèdre, especially, and the Syrah came in fantastic, which provided some compensation." Needless to say, production was off by quite a bit in '13 and there will be no Pure made, as that wine relies entirely on Grenache. Looking at the bright side again, Julien said that he was able to make a Fiancée bottling in '13 given the high quality of his Syrah, but he told me that he will only include this bottling in his yearly lineup "when there's great Syrah." The style here is moving steadily to what Barrot calls "lower alcohol, more spicy and more floral" because he has become less enamored of "massive wines." In fact, alcohol levels have been steadily declining here in recent years (the '13 Fiancée checks in at a svelte 14.3%, for example) and will likely continue to do so, "but not to where the wines' flavors and intensity are at risk."

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."