2008 Condrieu

Louis Barruol acknowledged that 2007 is "a fantastic vintage, no question, but the jury is out on how the wines will age. They're big, rich, forward and extroverted but that's not always the recipe for a graceful or long evolution. It's great if you like to drink your wines young, or somewhat young. Whether they have the backbone to age and evolve is the question. If you're after sweet fruit above all else, this is your vintage, for sure. For real complexity, we'll see." For those with patience and cool cellars Barruol can't recommend the 2005s highly enough, by the way. "That's the vintage you want if you like to drink wines with more than a decade of age on them," he told me.