M. Chapoutier had been a respectable Rhône négociant for the better part of two centuries when Michel Chapoutier took over the family house in 1990 and started doing something the appellation had never really tried. Instead of bottling Hermitage as a single grand cuvée — the way every serious Rhône producer had done since the appellation was codified — he began separating the hill parcel by parcel. The granite face of Hermitage stopped being one wine and became eight.
Maison Chapoutier was founded in 1808 and has been in the family since 1855, but the modern identity of the house is essentially Michel's. Within a year of taking charge he converted every Chapoutier vineyard to biodynamic farming, well ahead of mainstream Rhône, and in 1994 he became the first wine producer to put braille on the label after a blind musician friend complained that he could not identify a bottle without help. Both moves changed how the trade understood the brand, but the single-vineyard project changed what Hermitage means.
M. Chapoutier
The flagship of the project is Ermitage Le Pavillon, a Syrah from a four-hectare parcel of ninety-to-hundred-year-old vines on pure granite at the Bessards end of the hill. Yields drop low enough that only around seven thousand bottles leave the cellar each year, and the wine has earned a perfect score from critics in seventy-eight separate vintage-and-rating combinations in our catalogue. Beside it sit l'Ermite from the summit, Le Méal from the central terrace, and a handful of other lieux-dits, each treated as its own wine.
What looks like a marketing exercise to a sceptical reader is closer to a Burgundian reframe. Until the 1990s, Hermitage was discussed mostly as a single hillside; after Chapoutier, critics started writing about it the way they write about the Côte de Nuits — granite versus loess, summit versus mid-slope, this parcel versus that one. The other serious Hermitage producers eventually followed with their own lieu-dit bottlings, but Chapoutier had spent a decade defining the vocabulary.
The recent scores show the bet has held. The 2020 Chapoutier wines currently average 93 across critics tracked here despite a warm growing season, with the 2016s and the 2019s close behind. The 2024s, on early reviews, sit at 95. The trick, when warmer Rhône vintages have flattened other producers, is that the single-vineyard approach gives Chapoutier eight different lenses on the same hill — and at least a few of them keep their nerve in any given year.