Côte-Rôtie was a wine the world had nearly forgotten, and one family in the village of Ampuis decided that was a mistake. The slopes here are so steep they have to be worked by hand, terraced high above the Rhône. Guigal looked at those difficult hillsides and did something almost nobody in the northern Rhône had tried. It treated individual plots as if they were Burgundian grand crus.
Northern Rhône
The three wines that made the name are single-vineyard bottlings of Syrah, starting with La Mouline in 1966 and followed by La Landonne and La Turque. What set them apart was the cellar as much as the plots. Guigal ages them for roughly forty-two months in new French oak, a method that bordered on heresy in a region that had always leaned on large, old casks. La Mouline goes further still, co-fermenting its Syrah with about a tenth Viognier, a white grape, which lifts the red with a floral, silky edge most never get near.
The surprising part is that the same house selling those rare bottles is also the workhorse of the appellation. Guigal vinifies close to two-fifths of all the Côte-Rôtie made, buying grapes and finished wine from growers across the hillside for its basic red label. Few producers anywhere manage to be both the volume merchant and the maker of a region's most collected wines, and Guigal has spent decades showing the two do not cancel out.
For a drinker, the useful part is where the value hides. The famous single-vineyard wines have become trophies with prices to match, but Guigal's Hermitage and its everyday Condrieu come from the same hands and the same patience. Start there, and you learn what Ampuis worked out first. On the right slope, Syrah can be as serious as anything in France.
