The Many Faces of Chateauneuf-du-Pape

Our first visit to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the summer home of the popes in the fourteenth century, was on a gray December day. We had just driven up from Nice for a visit to the vineyard areas of the southern Rhone Valley. We were hungry and decided to have lunch in Chateauneuf because of its location just off the Autoroute. We planned to have lunch at La Mule des Papes in the middle of the village, but the menu looked too pedestrian so we looked around. We found a tiny place, La Garbure, just up the hill from the village square.

Naturally, we ordered a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape with our lunch. La Garbure’s list included many producers of the local wine, several of which were not familiar to us. We tried a bottle from Pierre Usseglio. In the mouth, it tasted warm, if there can be such a thing, and that isn’t a reference either to the actual temperature or the alcohol, but rather to the flavor profile. On our cold winter day, it was as if we had opened a bottle of summer sunshine. As a good Chateauneuf should be, it was delicious, rich and full-bodied. Needless to say, we greatly enjoyed our introduction to the wine of Pierre Usseglio, who is regarded as a good but not outstanding producer of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. By the way, we also greatly enjoyed the Provençal menu at La Garbure, and we have returned there often since then.

The Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Pierre Usseglio was notably different than the Chateauneuf with which we were most familiar, that of Chateau Beaucastel, or some of our other favorites, such as Domaine du Vieux-Telegraphe. But despite those differences, they were all far better than some mediocre wines we have encountered from this appellation.

After our lunch, we began driving the back roads through the vineyards of this famous appellation. We had read about and seen pictures of the very stony vineyards of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. But we soon observed that some of the vineyards had few such stones, other vineyards had smaller stones and some other vineyards were covered with the expected large stones. Clearly, not all Chateauneuf-du-Pape vineyards were the same in this respect.