To say Jerome Gradassi is a new talent is nearly but not quite right. He started in 2003 when he hung up his chefs whites and returned to take the reigns of his grandfathers small estate. After leaving his Michelin starred restaurant, he took with him a strong vision of the direction he wanted to move the small concern towards. This may well have been informed by the need for wine to work with food, not just blow the taster away with ripe fruit. Remember this era was the summit of Robert Parker’s influence and ripeness was regularly dialed up to 11 in search of ratings – but Jerome was much more interested in the older style wines of the region. The Mont-Redons, Vieux-Telegraphes and Beaucastel’s, and yes of course, the Rayas’. If his early vintages were marked by a sense of work in progress, by 2010 he was well into his stride.

Initially he had only 3 hectares but over the next few years he added another 2 which still slots him comfortably into the smallest of the small. Easy to forget, but most of the famous producers turn out a lot of wine. Vieux-Telegraph for example, have over 50 hectares and produce over 16,000 cases a year in total. Gradassi has in comparison around 850 cases of red and 33 cases of his white each vintage.

Farming is fully organic with absolutely no use of pesticides, herbicides, or chemicals. Jérôme works the vineyards traditionally, and harvests are done by hand. Grapes are vinified in full clusters, in concrete tanks carved into the rock which maintains an optimum temperature naturally. In the early days, he was moving the wine bucket by bucket from the concrete tanks as that was the limits of his primitive cellar.

He was fortunate in that the vinyeards he inherited fit well with his vision for the wine –  6 parcels located in the lieux-dits of Palestor, Bois Dauphin, and Cabrière, all north of the villages. All these parcels have a much cooler climate which is able to resist serious drought and produce elegant and aromatic wines, rather than powerful and extracted.

As it is impossible these days to write about Chateauneuf-du-Pape without liberally throwing around references to Chateau Rayas, the shining beacon of the appellation – it is telling that for a long time, this was the only other Chateauneuf-du-Pape imported by the exclusive importer of Rayas in the US, Martine’s Wines.

In France the wine was in the spotlight recently when the Revue de Vin de France adjudged the 2018 vintage as one of the 4 best Châteauneuf du Pape of the vintage – alongside Rayas, Capo de Pegau and Clos du Mont Olivet. Which when you think about it is quite a feat given just how different all those wines are from each other.

It’s not Rayas, nothing is, and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise – just because a car is red doesn’t make it a Ferrari – but it’s an authentically made, wonderfully good value wine from a producer working hard to put forward an artisanal vision for the future of Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

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