Wine Review: E Guigal Cotes du Rhone 2020 - A quality Cotes du Rhone

Hello there. For today's tasting I'm taking a look at a Côte d'Orone. So this is E. Guigual's Côte d'Orone. It's the 2020 vintage of that. So Guigual are an important producer of Rhone wines. They're based in En Puy. Their headquarters are on the west bank of the Rhone river, very close to Côte d'Orotie. And the business is both a winery and a négociant. As a winery they're one of the leading producers of both of Côte d'Orotie and of Condria. My understanding is that certainly at one stage they produced something like 45% of all the Condria that was produced. Etienne Guigual started the company in 1946. So I'm not sure whether the E under the E. Guigual is Etienne Guigual or whether it's the fact that the company used to be known as Etablissement Guigual. But possibly that's in recognition of Etienne. For the 15 years prior to starting his own company he'd been working for Vidal Fleury. In 1961 Marcel, Etienne's son, ended up having to leave school at the age of 17 to take over the family business as his father had been suddenly rendered blind. It was a difficult time for winemaking in the Côte d'Orotie region and honestly Marcel played a massive role in the rejuvenation of Côte d'Orotie as a region. There were plans at one stage to replace a lot of the vineyards there with housing. One of the main ways in which Marcel did this was to attract an enormous amount of attention to the region. He started producing wines much as they would be produced in Burgundy. Single vineyard wines. And his trio of Côte d'Orotie's, sometimes referred to as the La La wines, so La Moulin, La Landon and La Turc, had been so successful with critics that at one stage Guigual was the producer who held the most 100 point scores from Robert Parker's Wine Advocate. Today Philippe, Marcel's son, is the winemaker here. The third generation of his family to be making Guigual wines. The family have always invested their profits in further vineyards. They have significant holdings in Côte d'Orotie, Condria, Omitage, Crozet-Omitage, Saint-Joseph and Gigonda. They've also purchased quite a number of businesses. The first in 1985 being Vidal Fleury. Ten years later in 1995 they bought the historic Chateau d'Ampouy. In 2001 they purchased the Jean-Louis Gripat and Valouille estates. In 2006 they bought Domaine Bonserine and then most recently in 2017 in Chateauneuf-du-Pape they bought Chateau d'Analis. They've also established their own cooperage. On the same site that Étienne Guigual set out making wine they now have three hectares of cellars and their own estates cover 45 hectares. About half of which is in the prestigious Côte d'Orotie appellation. Having said all that the Côte d'Orotie is a negotiant wine. If you look at the back label it doesn't mention production. It simply says that the wine's been élève et mise en bataille par É. Guigual. Possibly as a result of that there's not a huge amount of detail about the winemaking and I should imagine that if you have different people producing these wines and selling them to Guigual the winemaking will vary to an extent. Certainly they say the soil types are diverse so they list sedimentary soils, limestone, they say pebbles. I wonder whether that's gravel or whether that's more galley like. Soils with granite and alluvial soils. What we're told about the winemaking is that it's traditional, the fruit is de-stemmed, it's crushed, it undergoes a temperature controlled fermentation and that maceration continues after fermentation is finished. The wine ages for a year and a half in oak barrels. Certainly it's French oak. I've seen a suggestion there may be some American oak used as well and they're using larger barrels, puncheons. When it comes to blending the final blend of this wine in this vintage was 50% of Syrah with 40% of Grenache and then 10% of Morvedra. So you'd expect from the Syrah and the Morvedra in this that this should be quite a structured wine but with a sort of a rounded soft mid palette from the Grenache. Given the size of the oak I'm not given any indication that there's a particularly large percentage is new. I would expect that the influence of the oak is more to soften and to allow control oxidation than to impart oak flavours into the wine. I've also seen an indication that Guigal aged the wine for three years so that would suggest that it then stays in bottle in their cellars for somewhere in the region of 18 months to release. So let's see what we make of the wine shall we? It's a reasonably dark ruby red. It's best medium to deep. I can quite clearly see the stem of the glass through the wine there. Now the label tells me that this wine has 15% alcohol so I'm not surprised to see it's forming some quite some quite heavy tears on the glass and that the tears are moving quite slowly down the edges of the glass there. Let's see what we make of the aromas shall we? The aromas are a rich ripe combination of sort of almost sort of plummy red fruit and some rich ripe raisin notes and sitting in between the two of those there's a quite a powerful sort of spiciness, a pepperiness, maybe a little bit of cinnamon so maybe the cinnamon's denoting a touch of new oak. I'm not all but I think it was probably more likely to be coming from the Syrah fruit. So let's taste. The wine is mouth-filling, it's rich, it's juicy, there's quite a smooth texture. Given that it's 15% alcohol actually there's good ripe fruit that's stopping the alcohol from immediately giving a warmth. It's just starting to cut in on the back of my tongue where there's a heat a little bit of an alcohol burn there. There are notes of spice and at the same time there's a bit of there's a little bit of tannic grip. This is quite a velvety smooth sort of texture in the mouth there. There's that richness and there's a sort of a red to black fruit there's a red plum through to dark plum but ripe red plum, cooked red plum and behind it these spices. I don't think they're particularly oak spices, there are peppery notes, perhaps a touch of cinnamon. There isn't a particularly obvious acidity to the wine but the fruit's retaining its freshness reasonably well and it's only when you get to the end of the palate that the alcohol is taking over slightly from the juicy fruit leaving it a little bit drying, a little bit spicy and perhaps foreshortening the finish just a little. In general I'd suggest that for Cote d'Aronne this is quite structured, it's quite full-bodied, there's a generosity, a ripeness, a richness and a roundness. Many Cote d'Aronne's are sort of soft and have more bright red fruit. This is a wine that I think would happily age for four or five years. I don't think you need particularly to age it. I think it's perfectly accessible to drink now. Looking at the aggregated score that we give this on the wine searcher website it gets an 89. I think that's a pretty fair score. I don't think I'd go particularly higher than that because the alcohol is quite obvious on the finish. 15% is really quite powerful and I think that's quite powerful actually for this particular wine. In other vintages it's more likely 14% and 14.5%. But this is not a hugely expensive wine and I don't think you can complain. I think you're getting great value for money for its richness and its power and I think you'd find that it's a versatile wine. Its spiciness would partner quite a lot of rich, full, flavoursome dishes very well. So thank you so much for watching. I do hope you've enjoyed the video. If you have enjoyed watching do please press the like button. If you have any views you'd like to express do please pop those in the comments box below. If you have any things you think we'd like to watch do please feel free to share it with them. We'd greatly appreciate that support from you. I will leave a link in the notes below so that you can follow that to the wine searcher website for our page for this vintage of this wine and you can see pricing, you can see availability, you can see the critic scores as I mentioned and any other detail we've got about the wine. So thank you once again for joining us and I do hope you'll manage to try and take some time and come and join us for another tasting in the near future. Thanks again. Bye for now.