Château Rayas

The 2007 Chateauneuf du Pape was slightly more impressive in its youth, and it's dropped a fair bit of color and is more upfront than I expected. Nevertheless, it's still a beautiful, elegant Rayas that offers classic notes of framboise, flower garden, strawberry jam and garrigue. Medium to full-bodied, seductive and elegant on the palate, with that seamless style that's rarely found outside of this address, drink it anytime over the coming decade or more.

We tasted three different ingredients in what will surely be a very famous wine. The first was from ‘the heart of Rayas’ on clay soils around the winery. It was markedly lighter than the Pignan at this stage on the nose but exceptionally rich in weight, while also managing to be racy, sweet and transparent too – as the much more developed Fonsalette had been. The second foudre, filled with wine made from even more clayey soils of Couchon, yielded up a wine with electric energy but one that at the moment was more introvert, while the third was the first–picked lot which even had a note of green along with the richness and animal aromas on the nose but on the palate was extraordinarily sweet and concentrated – yet was probably the chewiest of the three. In fact such was the intensity of the ripe fruit that I hardly noticed tannins at all in the first two samples.