M. Chapoutier
Ermitage Le Meal
Hermitage
2010

The producer

Originally founded in 1897, the modern history of the Chapoutier business begins with the arrival of 7^th generation Michel Chapoutier in 1990. He immediately converted the vineyards to biodynamics and expanded both the domaine and the negociant side of the business.

Chapoutier today owns vineyards throughout the Rhone, as well as sourcing grapes from longstanding partnerships with other growers; Chapoutier also own vineyards as far afield as Australia, Portugal, and Spain. The family’s winemaking philosophy is based on the concept of terroir, always allowing the terroir to express itself the maximum. Today, children Mathilde and Maxime are involved.

Despite the high quality of the other Rhone wines the greatest wines of this large domain are from the hill of Hermitage, where Chapoutier owns 34 hectares – the largest single holding on the hill. This allows production of several individual vineyard wines that are beautiful expressions of the different parts of the hill, whites as well as reds. We offer both red and white Hermitage from Chapoutier.

The wine

First produced in 1996, Le Meal is part of Chapoutier’s single vineyard selection. Fruit is derived from the Le Meal plot, which is planted with 50-year-old vines and is the warmest terroir on the Hermitage hill – why Le Meal is always the ripest and most generous of the single vineyard selection. Fruit is entirely destemmed, fermentation takes place in small cement vats, and is followed by maturation for between 14-18 months in new and one year old casks. Complex and generous, with layers of ripe smoky fruit and powerful velvety tannins, Le Meal can easily be kept for 30-60 years and with only 5,000 bottles of each vintage produced, bottles are often hard to find.  

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.