2015 Cote Rotie Lancement

Flowers, rocks, stones, licorice and Christmas spice explode in your face, along with all that ripe, dense, dark red fruits. On the palate, the wine is powerful, graceful, elegant and strong. The tannins are refined, ripe, soft and polished. The finish sticks with you for at least 60 seconds! The wine will age for decades with ease. But it will take some time to get to the sweet spot, as there is more going on here than the wine lets see in its youth.

(no new oak) Saturated ruby. Intense, mineral-tinged aromas of ripe red and blue fruits, smoked meat, incense and pungent flowers are accented by exotic Asian spice flourishes. Sappy and deeply concentrated yet lively on the palate, offering impressively focused boysenberry, raspberry, olive paste and floral pastille flavors that are underscored by a vibrant mineral quality. Smooth, gently gripping tannins build stealthily a floral-driven finish, which hangs on with outstanding tenacity and resonating spiciness.

The finest vintage of this cuvée to date, there's a scant four barrels of the 2015 Côte Rôtie Lancement, which comes from a site high up on the slope in the Côte Blonde end of the appellation. Completely destemmed and brought up all in new oak, it has the classic perfume this cuvée always shows yet is inky colored, deep, incredibly concentrated, and long. Exotic flowers, black cherries, hints of cassis, olive tapenade and peppery, gamey notes all soar from this full-bodied, seamless, straight up awesome Côte Rôtie that reminds me of what the 1978 Guigal La Mouline must have tasted like on release. With sweet, sweet tannin, no hard edges, and a grand, majestic personality, drink it anytime over the coming 20-25 years. I was able to taste the 2015s from the incredibly talented Stéphane Ogier twice, once during my visit at the estate, which was just after bottling, and then again from bottles shipped to my office in Colorado. These are ripe, polished, sexy wines from Stéphane that show the purity as well as the opulence of this great, great vintage. The 2016 vintage was compared to 2006 by Ogier, which was a solid, under the radar vintage from the northern Rhône. The barrel samples all showed terrific purity of fruit and balanced styles, and should check in near the top of the vintage. This estate is certainly at the top of its game and readers looking for some of the most profound Côte Rôties out there are advised to get on this estate’s bandwagon.