2008 Saint-Joseph

Wine Details
Place of Origin

France

Saint Joseph

Northern Rhône

Color

Red

Grape/Blend

Syrah/Shiraz

Reviews & Tasting Notes

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Jean Gonon told me that 2009 is a vintage that shows "great up-front fruit and then the minerality kicks in. There's a lot of black fruit, as with 2005, but there's an attractive element of finesse to the wine, especially to the tannins." Two thousand eight, he went on, "was a nightmare in terms of work and selection. After crop-thinning and selection after harvest the yield was almost nothing; the quality has surprised us but from a business standpoint it was a joke." Gonon emphasized that "white Saint-Joseph can improve with age just as well as the red, maybe even more so based on older bottles from Raymond Trollat [whose vines the Gonons now work] that we've drunk over the years." I recently had a bottle of 1990 Trollat Saint-Joseph blanc that I bought in 1992 and it was gorgeous, showing no signs of giving up the ghost and acting like a wine that was ten years younger. (Fruit of the Vines, New York, NY; Joli Vin, Berkeley, CA; Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Berkeley, CA):

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?The Gonon brothers, Pierre and Jean, took over the family's nine-hectare estate when their father Pierre fell ill and have established themselves as one of the leading producers in Saint-Joseph.? Jean told me that his family is fortunate to have syrah vines that are from 45 to 90 years of age and especially to have 2.5 hectares in Saint Jean de Muzols that belonged to Raymond Trollat before he retired.? The rest of Gonon's vines lie in Tournon and their hometown of Mauves.? Long-time Rhone lovers know that Trollat made some of the best wines of the entire RhoneValley in the 1980s and 1990s and the Gonon style cleaves closely to Trollat's traditional expression of syrah.? Whole clusters are used here ("except in a year like 2008, where the stems didn't ripen and we had to de-stem everything") and new oak is kept to the bare minimum.? The Gonons use demi-muids and foudres for their wines "to get the maximum expression of the wine" and crop their syrah vines at a very low 30 hectoliters per hectare, which Jean says "isn't that hard with our steep sites and old vines."? The plowing here is done with a horse and no chemicals are used in the vineyards, with all fertilizing done with their own compost.?