Jaboulet

This is not a wine I buy every year, but when the price is as good as it is hard to pass up. I last offer the Jaboulet Thalabert Crozes Hermitage in 2015, it sold out quickly. When I saw the 2020 offered from one of my suppliers last week was hard to say no, especially at a $34 retail price. This wine not only has the pedigree it has well over 100 years of history to go with it.

Jaboulet describes the vintage as particularly velvety and forward while still having the material to age. There’s plenty of depth and generosity,but underneath it is a wine that feels distinctly Northern Rhône. Pepper, olive, earth and spice all come through, and with six years already behind it, the wine is beginning to show more than just the fruit of the vintage. It drinks like a wine with some history behind it.

That history runs deep. Some of the Syrah vines go back to 1934, planted on the old stony terraces of the Rhône, and Jaboulet has owned the vineyard since 1834—more than a century before Crozes-Hermitage became an appellation. That kind of continuity has given Thalabert a strong identity of its own, and you can feel it in the depth and character of the wine.

And Jaboulet hasn’t simply relied on that history. The vineyard is now certified organic, the fruit is still harvested by hand, and yields in 2020 were only 30–35 hl/ha. It has the substance to keep developing, but there’s already enough time in bottle to make opening one now very tempting. At $34, this is an incredible wine, one I’d recommend by the case!