This négociant house is the largest landholder on the hill of Hermitage and produces four single-vineyard red Hermitage cuvées in its top Sélections Parcellaires range. Le Méal is a large, south-facing, warm lieu-dit composed mostly of clay and small pebbles. Grapes are destemmed and the wine aged in new and second-use barrels. The parcel of biodynamically grown, 50-year-old vines creates a Hermitage of great concentration, power and ageing potential in vintages such as 2015. Matt Walls: A beautiful nose, the essence of Hermitage: woodsmoke, balsamic notes, wild blackberries. Aromatically open now. Very intense, fresh and saline. Effortless and regal. Gearoid Devaney MS: Strong, intense nose, dark berries and plum sauce. Christmas cake, smooth tannins, dark chocolate and spices. Fiona Hayes: Coffee, cedar and spice. Concentrated and full, yet still totally in balance. Garrigue notes and liquorice, and a very long finish.

Bright magenta. A complex, hugely perfumed bouquet evokes ripe red and blue fruits, incense, candied violet and Moroccan spices, and a subtle vanilla flourish emerges as the wine opens up. Energetic, palate-staining raspberry liqueur, cherry pie, floral pastille and spicecake flavors show impressive depth and vivacity. Supple, even tannins build steadily on the penetrating finish, which eventually leaves behind notes of star anise and red fruit preserves.

Cask sample. Tasted blind. Dark blackish ruby. Firm, succulent fruit on the nose. Very polished tannins. Just the right side of overworked. Lots of well-managed tannin. Bone-dry finish. Very sincere; within the Hermitage idiom. But a very long-term wine. (JR)

A perfect wine, the 2015 Ermitage Le Méal offers straight-up otherworldly notes of black raspberries, toasted spices, licorice, scorched earth and flowers. With a huge, unctuous profile on the palate, a stacked mid-palate, sweet, sweet tannin and awesome purity, it's as good as it gets. This cuvée is always one of the more forward, sexy wines in the lineup, but it still needs 4-6 years of bottle age and will keep for 2-3 decades. Enough can’t be said about the quality coming from the estate of Michel Chapoutier. Taking over the domaine from his father in the late 1980s (his first vintage was 1989), Michel quickly moved the estate completely to bio-dynamic farming as well as building a new, state of the art winery located just outside of Tain l’Hermitage. These are classic, traditionally made wines that are never acidified (or chaptalized), are brought up mostly in demi-muids (with plenty of used oak), and bottled unfined and unfiltered. He also continues to grow the brand (this is easily one of the largest tastings I do every year from a single producer) and has added two new Côte Rôties in 2015, the Quatrain and Neve cuvees. The Quatrain is reserved for grapes that didn’t make it into the selection parcellaire releases, and the Neve comes from a single parcel in the northern part of the appellation. Both are impressive wines, although I don’t envy anyone trying to explain the full portfolio to buyers in the market. In addition, while it’s easy to focus on the top cuvées from this estate, the portfolio is packed with incredible values at just about every price point. These reviews focus on the 2015 and 2016 vintages, with all the 2015s tasted out of bottle and the majority of the 2016s still resting in barrel. The 2015 vintage is a monumental one for this estate and matches (and in a few cases, eclipses) what was accomplished in 2009 and 2010. These are ripe, concentrated, structured wines that are going to demand cellar time. In contrast, the 2016s are more elegant and silky, with terrific purity of fruit. They don’t have the sheer grandeur of fruit found in the 2015s, yet are seriously concentrated and have no shortage of tannins and structure.