2022 Château-Grillet, Northern Rhone

Patience will be required before tasting the monumental Château-Grillet 2022: from a warm vintage, it retains incredible freshness. While we are impressed by the frankness and power of its attack, it is in the length that it truly reveals itself: complex, with notes of tea, herbal infusions, yellow fruits, and candied citrus.

98 points, La Revue du Vin de France

The 2022 Château-Grillet is a masterpiece of elegance, with crystalline aromas of jasmine, lemon flesh, cedar, verbena tea and white flowers. It dances on the palate with precision and nuanced detail. A phenolic kick adds freshness to the laser-focused, incredibly long finish. Ethereal and light on its feet, the 2022 defies the hot growing season, delivering a one-of-a-kind Viognier experience.

98 points, Nicolas Greinacher, Vinous

Perched on a single steep amphitheatre of granite above the Rhône, Château Grillet is one of France’s great curiosities, a monopole appellation of just a few hectares dedicated entirely to Viognier. Its history stretches back centuries, long before Viognier’s modern revival, and today it sits under the stewardship of the Pinault family, alongside other icons in their collection. Everything here is about site, terraces carved into unforgiving slopes, painstaking vineyard work, and yields that are naturally tiny.

The 2022 vintage brings both ripeness and precision, a balance that suits Viognier beautifully. Aromatically it is layered and slowly unfolding, ripe apricot and white peach at the core, with preserved lemon, mandarin peel and a gentle thread of honeysuckle. There is a more complex, savoury dimension too, almond, crushed herbs, a touch of ginger spice and that unmistakable granitic imprint that gives the wine its quiet tension. It feels opulent at first glance, but there is restraint sitting just beneath.

The palate is where it truly separates itself. Textural and enveloping, yet never heavy, with a fine line of acidity that carries the fruit with surprising precision. Stone fruit and citrus glide into more savoury, almost saline notes, the granite lending a subtle grip and mineral length that stretches the finish well beyond what most Viognier can achieve. Oak is present but seamlessly integrated, adding depth rather than flavour, allowing the vineyard to remain the focus.

This is a wine that evolves constantly in the glass, shifting from fruit to spice to mineral, rewarding patience and attention. It carries both immediate allure and the promise of something far more complex with time.

At the table it deserves dishes with both delicacy and richness. Lobster with a light butter sauce, roasted turbot, or chicken with morels all work beautifully. It can also handle dishes with a gentle spice, where the aromatic lift of Viognier plays off the flavours without being overwhelmed.

While approachable in its youth with air, this is built for the long haul. Ten to twenty years will see it deepen and transform, developing layers of honey, truffle, roasted nuts and spice while retaining that defining mineral spine.

Rare, historic and unmistakably singular, Château Grillet remains one of the Rhône’s most distinctive expressions of Viognier, a wine that sits apart from everything around it.