Vignobles Levet Côte-Rôtie La Chavaroche 2020

About the wine:
Appellation: Côte Rôtie
100% Syrah
From the steeply sloped Chavaroche lieu-dit overlooking Ampuis
Soil: Mica-rich schists
Yields controlled via pruning, debudding, and occasional green harvesting, yields averaging 40hl/ha. Manual harvest, mid-September.
Fermentation: whole-cluster fermentation in stainless steel for 3 weeks. Pneumatic pressing. Spontaneous malolactic fermentation in vats. Aged 2 years in 600L demi-muids, 30% of which are new. Press wine blended after malo.
Vegetal fining agent, unfiltered. 

In the glass:
This is, quite simply, a ferocious wine, unique in its uninhibited expression of the smells and flavors of the appellation. No compromise is brooked here. The result is a wine that is controversial, too "wild" for many, but, us [Rosenthal], one of the most elite wines in our personal pantheon.

About the wine:

The grapes are generally not destemmed before passing through a pneumatic press. The primary fermentation takes place in epoxy lined cuves. There is a long maceration and the cuvaison lasts three weeks. The fermentation temperatures reach 30 degrees centigrade. The malolactic fermentation normally finishes by the end of the year. The wine is then racked into large oak barrels where it spends the remainder of its first year. At the beginning of the second year, the wines are racked into medium-sized barrels (“demi-muid”) 10 – 15% of which are new. In the third year, the wines are racked again and left to complete the barrel aging in a mixture of “demi-muid” and small barrels. The wines are bottled after three years of barrel aging with a light fining and no filtration. NOTE: Bernard Levet’s wines are well-structured wines that are built for aging and experience significant improvement with time in bottle. In our opinion, these wines at maturity reflect most effectively the true nature of the terroir of Cote Rotie.