2015 Cote Rotie La Mordoree

Dark purple. Spice- and mineral accented dark berry preserve, olive, vanilla and floral pastille aromas show excellent clarity and pick up licorice and cola nuances with air. Sappy and deeply concentrated on the palate, offering sweet boysenberry and cherry liqueur flavors sharpened by a zesty cracked pepper flourish. Powerful yet impressively energetic, delivering superb finishing clarity and velvety tannins that sneak in late to add shape and subtle grip.

Inky colored, the flagship 2015 Côte Rôtie La Mordorée is an utterly incredible wine any way you look at it and is a legendary Côte Rôtie in the making. Black raspberry, blackberry jam, toasted spices, dried flowers and cured meat notes give way to a sexy, full-bodied, ripe, and incredibly opulent 2015 that has sweet tannin, no hard edges and a huge finish. The fruit of the vintage, as well as the sweet tannin, allow this to offer pleasure even today, but it’s going to benefit from 5-6 years of bottle age and drink beautifully for 20-25 years. Enough can’t be said about the quality coming from the estate of Michel Chapoutier. Taking over the domaine from his father in the late 1980s (his first vintage was 1989), Michel quickly moved the estate completely to bio-dynamic farming as well as building a new, state of the art winery located just outside of Tain l’Hermitage. These are classic, traditionally made wines that are never acidified (or chaptalized), are brought up mostly in demi-muids (with plenty of used oak), and bottled unfined and unfiltered. He also continues to grow the brand (this is easily one of the largest tastings I do every year from a single producer) and has added two new Côte Rôties in 2015, the Quatrain and Neve cuvees. The Quatrain is reserved for grapes that didn’t make it into the selection parcellaire releases, and the Neve comes from a single parcel in the northern part of the appellation. Both are impressive wines, although I don’t envy anyone trying to explain the full portfolio to buyers in the market. In addition, while it’s easy to focus on the top cuvées from this estate, the portfolio is packed with incredible values at just about every price point. These reviews focus on the 2015 and 2016 vintages, with all the 2015s tasted out of bottle and the majority of the 2016s still resting in barrel. The 2015 vintage is a monumental one for this estate and matches (and in a few cases, eclipses) what was accomplished in 2009 and 2010. These are ripe, concentrated, structured wines that are going to demand cellar time. In contrast, the 2016s are more elegant and silky, with terrific purity of fruit. They don’t have the sheer grandeur of fruit found in the 2015s, yet are seriously concentrated and have no shortage of tannins and structure.

Slightly lifted and herbal, the 2015 Cote Rotie la Mordorée concedes no precision to the heat of the vintage, offering olive, raspberry and mocha shadings while being full-bodied, plush and velvety yet vibrant on the long finish. Now this is exciting!