Northern Rhône, it has the potential to grow to double the size of its nearest competitor, St Joseph, within a decade or two) – but it’s also different in terms of terroir and style.

It has at least three different sorts of vineyard site: classic, steep granite, loess and gravel slope terraces in the north; rich, limey clay (kaolin) slopes in the centre of the appellation; and extensive, pebble-rich brown or red clay flat-land soils in the south, on the Chassis plain, where the great majority of Crozes comes into being.  These soils have high potassium levels, meaning in general less piercing finished acid levels in its red wines than in some of its Northern Rhône peers, giving wines grown here potential fleshiness and voluptuousness.  Drinkers enjoy relaxing with that, especially when the wines are fruit-packed and tannin-structured, as they were in 2015.

For Crozes, vintage is all.  In a great vintage, the wines sing and dance, and can make old bones, too; in cooler and (especially) wetter vintages, they can struggle for density, ripeness and vigour.  Crozes-Hermitage in 2014, for example, is only patchily successful, and even wines from leading domains can show green tones.  After the magnificent growing season of 2015, by contrast – not a drop of rain between June and mid-August; a leonine July; and fine, warm though tempered harvest weather in mid-September – red Crozes in on song as never before. 

Here is a selection of tasting notes for the top-scoring wines in a blind tasting of 60 red Crozes-Hermitages, tasted in Tain in mid-February.  I doubt that there will be better Northern Rhône values in this vintage than these wines.

Read more at source: Decanter