Châteauneuf-du-Pape: Revisiting 2020 in bottle

I remember tasting the 2020 Châteauneufs after they’d spent a year in barrel. It wasn’t the joyful experience it perhaps should have been, as winemakers often appeared subdued.

It wasn’t due to the quality of the wines, but rather the timing of my trip; I was visiting them just as they’d finished picking their 2021s – a punishing vintage, marked by cool conditions, low yields and patchy quality.

The 2020s in my glass however were often outstanding. Not in the concentrated, structured style of the preceding 2019s, but in an altogether fresher, more elegant vein.

Scroll down for the top-scoring 2020 Châteauneuf-du-Pape wines to try

It was clear then that 2020 was a very good vintage – but was it a great one? I had some niggling doubts.

Would the Tradition bottlings (an estate’s main bottling, as opposed to its top Cuvée Spéciale), some of which appeared quite light, take on weight once bottled?

And given that it wasn’t as concentrated as vaunted vintages like 2019, 2016 and 2010, did it nonetheless have the longevity you’d expect from a top year?

I’ve been looking forward to revisiting the 2020 Châteauneufs in bottle to answer these questions. Having tasted over 100 examples, I’m now in no doubt that 2020 is an excellent year, in quite a distinct style.

Growing season

It was a relatively stress-free season for growers in Châteauneuf. According to Marilou Vacheron at Le Clos du Caillou, ‘the vines accumulated significant water reserves of more than 400mm in autumn and winter. In addition, the winter and spring temperatures were quite mild, leading to rapid budburst two weeks early’.

With no frost and a plentiful flowering, crop loads were generous.

Like 2019, it was another hot and dry year, but without the same extremities. Nights were marginally cooler too, ‘which allowed a good synthesis of anthocyanins and tannins,’ says Vacheron.

Despite some rains just before and during harvest, Caroline Charrier at Domaine Font de Courtedune remembers that ‘the health of the grapes was very good… we started the harvest around 7 September, so a normal year’.

Others, such as Fabrice Brunel at Domaine les Cailloux, started earlier.

‘It was a very early harvest. We started on 20 August and finished on 20 September,’ says Brunel, ‘the harvest was short and intense, with the different grapes and terroirs maturing closer to each other than normal,’ with all the different varieties performing well.

‘These conditions gave very good yields of quality grapes producing wines with a sunny profile but good balance,’ says Brunel. ‘Juicy wines with beautiful smooth tannins and a lovely aromatic complexity.’

The tasting

The brightness that made these wines so compelling from barrel has not diminished in bottle. Not just freshness of fruit flavour and brisk acidity, but the tannins have a cleansing and precise texture that make the wines feel enlivening.

It’s true that the 2020 vintage doesn’t always have the muscle of the most powerful vintages, but it certainly has sufficient concentration – it’s far from weak. There are no problems with underripeness. On the contrary, around 10% of the wines I tasted had an overripe, jammy or baked character.

The alcohol levels are fairly elevated, and sometimes simply too high. But don’t use published ABVs as a guide, as this is an overly simplistic approach. There are many wines that are rich in alcohol but nonetheless taste balanced and have a lot to offer. Smart use of whole bunches by some winemakers was beneficial in creating balance.

When I tasted the wines from barrel, a good number of Tradition bottlings felt a little light. But largely they have taken on the weight and density in bottle that I’d hoped, and there are a lot of excellent, well-balanced, relatively inexpensive wines to choose from. I’ll be publishing a list of top-performing sub-£50 wines in my next column, including six that scored 95 points.

Analysing my tasting notes this time around, I was surprised to see that most of the wines that I’d rejected were in fact Cuvées Spéciales; usually due to overoaking, overripeness or unbalanced alcohol.

Quality and longevity

When I first tasted the 2020 Châteauneufs, I had some lingering reservations about their longevity, particularly the lighter-seeming Traditions. But having revisited them in bottle, these doubts have since been extinguished.

Thanks to its bright and compact nature, many of the wines are approachable now or will be within a couple of years. And due to their freshness and balance, most have a comfortable lifespan of 15-20 years; some up to 30 years.

Most so-called ‘great vintages’ in Châteauneuf are ones with power and concentration. But ‘greatness’ in Châteauneuf can be expressed in more ways than one, and if you value freshness, energy and drinkability in Châteauneuf, then 2020 deserves that moniker too.

I asked Benjamin Gras of Domaine Santa Duc how he would rate the vintage, and his thoughts chimed with my own. ‘Perfection doesn’t exist, so therefore I’d say 19/20!’ he says.

If you can still find them on the market, don’t hesitate to snap them up.

2020 Châteauneuf revisited:

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