Tardieu-Laurent Côtes-du-Rhône Rouge Cuvée Spéciale
The winery describes this as a ‘vin de mouchoir’ or a ‘handkerchief wine’. By this, they mean a wine so delicate and perfumed that you feel like daubing a lace (of course) handkerchief so that you might enjoy its fragrances all throughout the day.
However, we recommend that you also enjoy the wine the old fashioned way and drink it. Aromatic, a lightness to the body, built on old vine Grenache, it has a stately elegance. It’s a delight.
Farmed organically (recent low yields attest to that), the juice is vinified with 100% whole bunch. The wine spends around 10 months in second and third use old barrels and around eight months in foudres.
From 70-year-old vines (95% Grenache) just outside Châteauneuf du Pape, the undestemmed 2018 Cotes du Rhone Cuvee Speciale spent time in used barrels and foudres. It's a more lacy style of Côtes du Rhône than the Guy Louis bottling, with herbal nuances woven into silky tannins, graceful sweeps of cherries and pomegranate and a touch of licorice on the refreshing finish.
91 points, Wine Advocate (September 2020)
Let’s see the whole-bunch effect. Garnet rather than crimson and not that intense in terms of colour. Wild-berry sort of fruit – quite different again from the other two 2018 Côtes du Rhône reds in this collection. Very sweet with a little white pepper note at the end. Pure pleasure but not quite as much refreshment as the Guy Louis.
16.5 points, JancisRobinson.com (October 2019)
