2008 Châteauneuf-du-Pape

This is another producer who opted to make a single wine from 2008. "It was clearly going to be difficult to sell high-end cuvees from 2008," Thierry Usseglio told me, "and it's important not to risk your reputation by releasing wines that are supposed to be special if you aren't 100% proud of them. Very good isn't good enough and besides, it's also good to make a serious basic wine from a hard vintage like 2008, to show what you can achieve under pressure." Usseglio describes 2009 as "a vintage that will appeal to all types of people except maybe the ones who demand wines of enormite. They are absolutely not light and in the past they would probably have been considered pretty huge but the standard has been changed, especially since 2003." I found the 2009s here to be pretty serious wines, in fact, with real depth and chewiness, not to mention more dark fruit character than I expected.

There will be only a single Chateauneuf bottled from 2008, Thierry Usseglio told me in November. "If the quality isn't there we can't risk the wines' reputation or ours by acting like we were able to make something that we couldn't," he explained. "The 2007s are showing a lot right now and are extremely seductive," he added, "but they have the depth to age. What makes them unique is that they show power without the hardness that is usually associated with masculine wines. They may not live as long as the 2005s but they will probably provide more pleasure for a longer period of time than the more serious '05s, which are no fun now and won't be for a while."