2012 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Cuvee Spéciale

Bastien Tardieu told me that because of the tardy flowering in 2013 it was essential to wait until late into the fall to harvest "or else your Grenache wouldn't have proper ripeness and it would be bottled with green character." Production was off by over 50% here in '13 and there will be no Cuvée Spéciale bottling as all of that juice went into the regular and Vieilles Vignes bottlings. Even then there were only 15 barrels of the VV, as opposed to a normal 30.

While the wines here are often associated with abundant new oak, that's not an accurate generalization at all. The utilization of new barrels has always been determined wine by wine and vintage by vintage, with no set recipe. In addition, the Tardieus have been quickly moving to greater use of large-format casks and are now the proud owners of a battery of Stockinger foudres and large tronconic oak vats that will play a major role in vinification and élevage here for years to come.

"The easiest word to describe 2011 is freshness," in the opinion of Michel Tardieu.But one had to wait until late to harvest or there wasn't enough fruit concentration to go with that freshness, he added."And then you had to worry about losing acidity, but that didn't happen."As Dominique Laurent has been completely out of the picture here for almost a decade, Michel and his son Bastien are toying with the idea of changing the name of their winery to Famille Tardieu.That designation is starting to appear on their labels "but it isn't easy for the public to accept a radical name change too quickly," said Michel, so Tardieu-Laurent is still the official name here.