2020 Rhonea "Terroir Daronton" Gigondas

Deep magenta. The perfumed nose showcases spice-accented cherry, raspberry and fragrant floral notes. Broad and seamless in texture, offering appealingly sweet red and blue fruit, allspice and licorice flavors and a touch of lavender. Delicate tannins add shape to the persistent, sharply focused finish, which echoes the spice and floral notes. (JR)

Gigondas is one of my favorite Rhone regions. The hillsides there provide the ideal environment for sussing out Grenache's ample fruit but tempering it with minerality and spice notes. Rhonea is big producer in the area and they make tremendous value wines across Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Beaumes des Venise. All top crus and top-notch winemaking. They have access to great fruit among their growers and put together accessible and on-point bottlings. The Terroir Daranton is one of the best wines that I have tasted from them to date. From a terrific vintage, now a couple of years in bottle, this wine shows black fruit notes with blackberry, currants and fig jam plus those lovely Grenache-tobacco aromas. I tasted my first sample over the course of a couple of days and it drank well opening further and sustaining itself beautifully while I held onto it. Normally this wine runs north of $40 a bottle but since we had a past relationship with them, we were able to bring it in for a nearly broken price of $20. It is rare to see delicious Gigondas under $30 (and I do have some other great examples) but under $20?!? Not for many years. It hits so hard, we bought everything left at the winery. This will go down as one of the best buys of the year!