Alain Graillot, Crozes-Hermitage Blanc, 2018
I'm a Fan Boy.
Graillot was literally there at my Big Bang moment, my Year One, the day Fat Man and Little Boy dropped into my gaping maw. In the very first months that I fell in love with wine, I had salivated when I read a tasting note for the Crozes-Hermitage, 2000 and drank that very wine at my first wine tasting soon after. I drank just about everything the legendary Master of Crozes and his son has made: the regular Crozes, the rare flagship La Guiraude, the wines from son Maxim's domaine, even the (it pains me to say it) awful Moroccan wine.
But never the white Crozes.
Before I developed a virile bias against white Rhone grapes, I could only only find it abroad. When Lifshitz started importing Graillot, my bias kept me away.
But I just could not abide the thought of anyone else playing with "my" Graillot while I was out of the game.
So, here I am now, thinking about the wonder of it all. About a guy coming into the hinterlands of Crozes-Hermitage, at a time when bottles of Hermitage itself were selling for a handful of Francs, and coaxing pearls out of swines. Then passing the torch (and skills) on to his sons, who made this wine.
It's a lovely wine, full of the summer fruits that must have captivated the wine lovers weaned on the apples and pears of Burgundy whites; true to the French paradigm that fruit is superfluous unless enveloped by secondary and tertiary aromas and flavors, it elegantly shares the stage with hints of roasted nuts and, almost surprisingly, a balanced brace of flint. It's not a wine of enormous depth or great complexity, rather one that makes the most out of an almost offhanded elegance and a sweet finish tempered by a kiss of umami.
The tech sheet: 80% Marsanne, 20% Roussanne, 35+ year old vines, very rocky gravel soils, indigenous yeasts, no malo, 50% aged in 1 year old Burgundy barrels, 50% aged in tank.
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