Winemaker Notes
Bright color, purple with a violet hue. Discreet nose requiring aeration. Aromas develop with finesse and much complexity; blackberry jam, licorice sticks, a hint of roasting and spice. Full and generous on the palate. Mid-palate reveals rich aromas of ripe fruit and a hint of smokiness. Tannins are dense and intense, but with great finesse, giving the wine imposing structure and a long finish. A truly superb wine.
Pair with roast duck breast fillet, creamy polenta, grilled mezenc rib steak with truffled mashed potatoes, Creamy Brillât Savarin or Chaource cheese.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Glass-staining purple color. Incredibly powerful with searching perfume, leaf tea and glove leather behind the intense black fruits. Very fine and deep, perhaps just a touch too high in alcohol, a little over extracted. Phenomenal concentration and length however. A growling, brooding power, this could only be Hermitage. From vines of nearly 50 years of age grown organically on lieux-dits Beaumes and Péléat, matured in demi-muids with malolactic fermentation in barrel.
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Jeb Dunnuck
I continue to rave about the wines of Yann Chave, and readers should snatch up these wines before the market catches up to the quality. Dense purple, with a great nose of chocolaty blackberries, bloody meat, iron, scorched earth, and pepper, the beautiful 2019 Hermitage hits the palate with full-bodied richness, a dense, layered mid-palate, and enough tannins to warrant at least 5-7 years of bottle age. It pushes on the ripeness scale and is one monster of a Hermitage that's going to have 20-30 years of longevity.
Rating: 95+ -
James Suckling
There is so much power and concentration in this Hermitage. Intense aromas of spiced cherries, thyme, earth, smoke, peppercorns, roasted meat, cloves and tobacco leaves. It’s full-bodied with fine, firm tannins. It’s solid and well-built with structure. It has a punchy character throughout with tannins framing and containing the intensity which develops through the long, funnelled and compact finish.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
A fairly concentrated and rich bottling, Yann Chave's 2019 Crozes Hermitage offers up scents of espresso, blackberries and black olives. It's medium to full-bodied, tannic but ripe, with hints of licorice and plum on the long finish. This could be really good in another year or two.
Rating: 91+
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.