Walls: 30 premium Côtes du Rhône wines to try

Côtes du Rhône is a beloved brand among casual wine drinkers in both the UK and the US. It’s a mid-week mainstay. But as a Decanter Premium subscriber, your relationship with wine is likely to be rather more than casual… Are Côtes du Rhône wines really worth your attention?

Some, definitely. Just as a revered appellation can elevate the value of a wine, a relatively lowly one can hold prices back. So when top estates bottle wines as Côtes du Rhône, they’re often sold at a fraction of the price of their top cuvées.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for 30 premium Côtes du Rhône wines

Oceanic volumes

Côtes du Rhône is a titanic appellation. It represents 48% of all AC wines produced in the Rhône Valley. We’re talking around 150 million bottles per year.

The growing area covers 171 villages: for a sense of scale, the largest cru in the Rhône, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, covers just five. (The best 95 of these 171 villages can use the appellation Côtes du Rhône Villages and I’ve included these in the round up too).

Some individual cuvées are made in gigantic volumes, it’s true. Large negociant houses can make up to 4.5 million bottles of Côtes du Rhône a year, blended across countless villages.

But big doesn’t necessarily mean bad. And just as Côtes du Rhône wines are made in massive volumes, others are made on an altogether more artisanal scale.

What makes a premium Côtes du Rhône wine?

There are a number of criteria which create top-flight Côtes du Rhônes:

1. It’s made by a great estate with a unique winemaking style, for example Château de Fonsalette and Château des Tours, owned by Château Rayas. Fonsalette’s Côtes du Rhône, Cuvée Syrah, typically costs around £500 per bottle, or twice that in a top vintage.

2. It’s made from a pocket of exceptional terroir that happens to be within the Côtes du Rhône growing area. Domaine JP Jamet’s Côtes du Rhône is made from granite slopes that border Côte-Rôtie.

3. The wines are grown from excellent vineyards within crus or named villages, but the winemaker decides to declassify the wines as Côtes du Rhône. Perhaps they want to include a local grape variety that’s not permitted in the cru’s rulebook; or they might not agree with the official appellation system; or they might find it just makes life easier to bottle all their wines under the same appellation.

There is a fourth possibility:

4. A producer decides to make a special cuvée by extending ripening times, extracting enthusiastically, ageing the wines in new oak barrels, attaching an optimistic price tag and hoping for the best. The results are rarely pleasant, but thankfully wines like this are relatively uncommon.

See additional premium Côtes du Rhône wines here

The tasting

In a recent tasting of premium Côtes du Rhône, quality varied wildly from extremely good to regrettably poor. But the best half were impressive wines by any standards. Even the 2021s, a difficult vintage, were much more successful than I expected.

Some of the best reds, such as the two Gramenon cuvées, didn’t show brilliantly straight away, but gradually opened up over several days. This might not be terribly convenient if you’re planning to drink them with a specific meal. But it served as a reminder that sometimes we need to fall in with a wine’s rhythms (particularly when they’re young), rather than always expecting them to fit with our schedule.

I was curious to see whether the more stringent Côtes du Rhône Villages appellation was a guarantee of higher quality. Among the red wines, it wasn’t. But among the whites, there was a loose correlation between top scoring wines and this higher tier.

There is another useful marker on the label however, if you’re not familiar with the estate. Those that were certified organic tended to score higher, and three of the four top-scoring wines were biodynamic. Coincidence? Somehow I doubt it.

Matt Walls’ top picks: 30 premium Côtes du Rhône wines

Related articles

• Top Côtes du Rhône wines under £20/$25
• New Côtes du Rhône Villages appellation granted – Nyons
• Walls: Tasting Château de Montfaucon – ‘Lirac’s finest wines’