2006 Rhône Offer – A Bracing Concentration

Looking south from atop the Hill of Hermitage

Right. Here goes. I have taken a Major Decision regarding our Rhône offer this year. Wracked, as I am, by the weight of responsibility, I have decided to unleash on the world not one Rhône offer, but two.

Every year, I feel as though I trot out the same old guff. I start by emphasising the point that the northern and southern Rhône wine producing regions are so dissimilar as to be beyond compare and mention what a shame it is that these differences are insufficiently emphasised.

I then launch into an occasionally mysterious analogy about the geography of the region(s) in question, recruiting, thus far, the common frying pan and the slightly less common igloo as similes to help get across the physical fact that "the Rhône", in (French) wine producing terms, is a long, narrow, vine-clad cleft (the northern Rhône) appended to a broad and expansive plain (the southern). N.B. Anyone mystified as to what I am harping on about can find out by reading introductions to Rhône offers past. These can be found at our website by clicking Library and Archive, then Offer Archive, from the Main Menu.

None of this, I suspect, goes any distance in alleviating whatever misapprehensions the reader may or may not have about one of the most important wine growing places on earth.

So…enough! Two regions; two offers. Clever, eh?

Walking through centenarian Grenache vines near Châteauneuf-du-Pape

» 2006 Northern Rhône Offer

» 2006 Southern Rhône Offer