2009 Gigondas Hominis Fides

One wine that showed no evidence of hail damage whatsoever, and was a great success for Barruol is the 2009 Gigondas Hominis Fides, which comes from sandy and limestone soils. This wine has an opaque purple color and a sweet nose of blueberries and blackberries intermixed with graphite, truffle and white flowers. The wine has terrific fruit, beautiful density and texture, and a long finish. It has taken a while, but one of my favorite producers in the southern Rhone, Louis Barruol of Saint-Cosme, is getting very good publicity just about everywhere I look. It is certainly well-deserved, considering the broad range of wines he produces, from his inexpensive and over-delivering Cotes du Rhones and Vins de Pays, to his top-flight, world-class wines made in Gigondas. This is all a matter of hard work and understanding viticulture and great terroirs. As for the estate wines from Gigondas, 2009 was a more challenging vintage for Louis Barruol than many people probably understand, because he had some serious hail issues that cut into his Grenache crop. His best vintage to date is 2007, but 2010 is going to come close, and he has certainly excelled in a much more difficult vintage for him personally, 2009. The 2010s are probably Barruol’s greatest vintage since 2007, yet slightly more tannic and backward at a similar stage in their development than the 2007s were. All of the following wines are 100% Grenache, with the exception of the first two. Importer: Vintage ‘59, Washington, DC; tel. (202) 966-9218

Needing a full three days to finally flesh out and shed its oak elevage, the 2009 Château de Saint-Cosme Gigondas Hominis Fides, a barrel aged (some new) blend of 100% Grenache from sand and limestone soils, displays amazingly pure aromas of raspberry, blackberry liqueur, white pepper, creamy licorice, flowers, spice box, and cedar on the nose. While it starts out semi-opaque in color on the first night, it shows a deep purple/ruby color with air and possesses a medium to full-bodied, brilliantly focused texture, solid concentration, perfectly integrated acidity and tannin, and a very long finish where the class of the wine shows. More elegant than powerful, with a backwards, concentrated feel, this needs time. Give bottles a solid 5-7 years of bottle age, and then drink over the following two decades.

Mid to dark crimson with some blue notes. Very mellow and rich. Lots of spice. Just rather drying tannins on the end. Bit of a spice box! (JR)