Winemaker Notes
With a classic vintage profile, this refined, complex, and vibrant red wine has notes of black fruit, tart cherry, and violets.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Floral and fragrant on the nose, so beautifully expressive and inviting. Clean and clear, so smooth and seductive with strawberry, cherry and raspberry with soft florality and a tight, wet stone, slate edge giving an iron and mineral tang. Hints of blood orange - bitter zest - with clove and wood spice, pepper tobacco and liquorice too. Fun and friendly, packed full of flavour with lovely, well-integrated tannins, barely there, all the flavour and concentration is coming from the fruit. Not the most expansive or rich, this is lighter and more delicate despite the overall sense of heat and spice and fruit. Long finish, with clear terroir markers. Well defined with a sense of refinement. 3.74pH. Ageing for 12 months in French oak barrels (15% new), and in natural concrete eggs with malolactic fermentation. The first time this historic wine by Caroline Frey will be sold on the Place de Bordeaux.
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James Suckling
Incredibly deep and complex nose for the 2021 vintage with masses of forest berry, licorice and autumn trumpet mushroom aromas, with an enormous tannin structure that's very refined. The classic power of Hermitage comes through at the extremely long finish. Although the tannins are anything but aggressive, the aromas will need considerable time to fully unfurl. From parcels on the western side of the Hermitage hill with predominantly granite soils, the largest parcel being in Le Meal. From organically grown grapes. Drinkable now, but best from 2026.
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Wine Spectator
A refined, elegant version that's poised and aromatically expressive, showing bold black raspberry and brambly red berry details, with white pepper and floral high tones. Shy at first, this emerges with time in glass, revealing textural purity and notes of toasted aniseed, cigar box and rosemary, all held in place by a firm spine of iron and polished tannins. This will stand the test of time in the cellar. Drink now through 2040.
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
One of the smallest and most important Syrah regions of northern Rhone, Hermitage is practically one single south-facing slope of crushed granite, thinly covered with varied, yet well-charted soil types. Many climats (well identified parcels) exist within Hermitage and while some smaller producers make single climat Syrahs, some larger ones blend to make one balanced expression of the appellation.
Though the AC regulations allow the addition of up to 15% white grapes to a red Hermitage, in practice it is usually made from Syrah alone. Winemaking is pretty traditional—or you might say historic—with hot fermentations and aging in older barrels of various sizes. The best wines, characterized by deep, dense and sexy flavors of black fruit, cocoa, licorice and tobacco, have massive textures and a solid 10-20 years aging potential.
The region of Hermitage is totally enclosed; the only place it could go really is to literally fall down its own hill into the city of Tain or the Rhone River. Soil erosion is a problem and terraces exist alongside the hill in order to keep the earth in place. Crozes-Hermitage encloses the region entirely to its north and south.
While Hermitage seems synonymous with some of the best Syrah on the planet, actually about one third of the wine produced here comes from white grapes. The full, lush and robust Marsanne or the less common, but almost more charming, Roussanne create wonderful whites in which the best have great potential for aging, like the reds.