Réserve Vin de Pays de Vaucluse Red Rhone Blend

Effusive, soulful, brimming with delicious fruit and goût de terroir to keep you engaged for hours. Ripe black raspberry, stewed red plum, blood orange, juniper, white pepper, cinnamon, nori, menthol, cool/damp earth, black tea, potpourri, lavender pastilles. This well seated, its fruit and structure are generous where they need to be and restrained at just the right point, certainly expressing the 2016 vintage perfectly right now. Such a great compliment with paella.

Awesome racy ripe Kirsch great acid and tension.

I liked the generosity of flavor here, quite open and sweet fruited and packed more of a whallop than the 13.5% might indicate. red fruited, herbal and pleasant, but also came off as a bit tired and soupy, not a lot of focus here. That being said, worked great with beef tartare.

Preserved strawberry and unparalleled wild flower.

From the cellar of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. One of the steals of the wine world and very hard to come by, as this sub $70 bottle is made by the illustrious Château Rayas and Emmanuel Raynaud. By no means am I a Merlot drinker and by no means does this bottle seem anything but Syrah. Funky and animalistic showing boysenberry, sweet red currants, dried flowers and garrigue. Finishes with good length and impressive complexity.

Loganberry, black pepper, licorice, powdered sugar, earth, violets, soft tannins

White pepper, fresh violets, round, fresh, light extraction. Like a young woman wearing a white sun dress, walking through a flower garden on a summer afternoon.

Strawberry mixes with raspberry, green stems and all, further complicated by notes of rhubarb, white pepper and subtle sweet spices, as the 2015 Domaine Des Tours Vaucluse slowly opens up in the glass. On the palate, it soothes the senses with soft, fleshy textures, as depths of ripe red fruits drench the senses, made juicy through vibrant acids with pretty inner rose tones resonating throughout. The finish is long and dramatic, leaning toward sweetness, yet perfectly framed by minerals and cheek-puckering tension, remaining fruity and floral up to the bitter end. This is certainly a ripe vintage for this wine, yet there’s so much energy that it’s hard to fault it for its extroverted persona.

Learning the Rayas way with their entry-level red. So bloody good. Perhaps not as layered as the des Tours CDR (let alone the other cuvees), but at $40 it's hard value to beat. It captures the soul of Rayas so well. That dark cherry and raspberry, and the bitter orange peel finish (which I saw in all 3 rayas drank in the past week).

Easy company