2017 Côte-Rôtie Domaine des Pierrelles

Production was way off for Jaboulet in 2017, courtesy of a hot, arid summer, but the wines are definitely up to snuff, showing little in the way of overripeness or loose-knit character. Indeed, I found many of the 2017s to be at a quality level approaching the excellent, if more buoyant 2016s. The thick skins of the small berries ensured less juice than usual but, interestingly, I didn’t detect excessive tannins, which one might expect with high skin-to-juice ratios. Jean-Luc Chapel, who oversees international marketing for the Frey family’s wineries, told me that he sees the 2017s as wine “that could easily be enjoyed soon, especially while waiting for the 2015s, but it’s a mistake to see it as a vintage that must be drunk young.” They’re surprisingly balanced for wines from a warm year, he said. “They’re maybe comparable to 2009, and those wines are aging extremely well.” All of the wines here are made with de-stemmed fruit and see between 15% and 20% new oak.

Caroline Frey told me that there was “extreme variation during the entire growing season” in 2017. “It’s not an easy one to generalize,” she said, pointing out that the resulting wines don’t behave like those from most hot vintages. “It was a warm, dry winter and it got things started fast, with budbreak in late March, more than two weeks earlier than 2016.” But then there was delayed flowering that began only in early June because of cold weather that came in mid-April and held steady until the end of May. The weather warmed up quickly and hot, dry conditions, with the exception of some hard rains in May and mid-June, defined the late spring and the summer. Harvest commenced early, in the second week of September, and clement weather allowed it to extend into mid-October, with a small crop realized of ‘healthy and uniformly ripe fruit across the appellations.” The resulting wines are “well-concentrated from the warmth, low yields and small berries, but also quite energetic for their volume and power,” Caroline Frey thinks. These 2017s are, indeed, on the rich side, with plenty of depth, power and dark fruit character. They are not overripe, however, which should help them age slowly and positively.