Côte Rôtie Château d'Ampuis, Etienne Guigal 2017

I loved the 2017 Côte Rôtie Château D'Ampuis. This brilliant wine is as seamless and sexy as they come, with medium to full-bodied richness and nothing out of place. Black raspberries, spice box, hints of game, and spicy oak all define the bouquet, and while it’s not massive, it has nothing out of place, offering ripe, polished tannins, beautiful purity, and a great finish. It’s just a flat-out gorgeous bottle of wine. Reminding me of the 2011, it should have two decades of prime drinking at a minimum.

A big step up over the 2017 Brune & Blonde (which I rated 91 points back in May 2021), Guigal's 2017 Cote Rotie Chateau d'Ampuis epitomizes the appellation, with sexy complexities of smoky bacon fat interlaced with skeins of blueberries and cherries. Full-bodied, creamy and lush in feel, finishing long and succulent, it's a terrific Cote Rotie to drink over the next 20 years.

The 2017 Côte-Rôtie “Château d’Ampuis” from the Guigals is a beautiful, new oaky example of this marvelous appellation. The wine is made from vines that are all in excess of fifty years of age, with the bottling’s cépages being ninety-three percent syrah and seven percent viognier. The wine is aged entirely in new oak casks for thirty-eight months prior to bottling, so that the 2017 is the new release. The wine comes in at an even fourteen percent octane and delivers a lovely, new oaky nose of raspberries, spiced meats, a beautifully complex base of soil, woodsmoke, a touch of hazelnut, violets and a very well done framing of spicy new oak. On the palate the wine is pure, full-bodied, focused and very elegant in profile, with a lovely core of fruit, excellent soil signature, impeccable focus and balance, ripe, fine-grained tannins and a long, complex and very, very promising finish. This is a great bottle of Côte-Rôtie in the making, but, to my palate, it needs some time in the cellar to fully bury its framing of new oak, so that the other elements can take center stage. But, the balance here is lovely and in the fullness of time, as the oak recedes a bit more, this is going to be stellar juice.

I loved the 2017 Côte Rôtie Château D'Ampuis. It’s a ripe, expressive barrel sample overflowing with notions of black raspberries, cassis, vanilla bean, and incense. Medium to full-bodied, rounded, and silky, it has lots of ripe tannins as well as stunning balance. It’s in the same ballpark as the 2016 yet shows the warmer, sunny nature of the vintage.