If anyone tells you that Châteauneuf is just a big red that’s never elegant, then they need to taste this masterpiece of elegance. So many spicy and savory nuances on the very concentrated but almost perfectly proportioned palate. This is both joyful and serious at the very long, focused finish. Decades of aging potential! Drink or hold.

Dark cherries, plums, garrigue, pepper, and kirsch create the nose. Rich, lush, polished, and silky with length, energy, and freshness, the sweetness in the kirsch, with its spice-box, peppery herbs, and cherries with a touch of mint-leaf lingers on the palate. Produced from a blend of 60% Grenache, 15% Syrah, 15% Mourvedre, and 5% Cinsault, along with other, assorted red and white grape varieties. 60-70% of the harvest is destemmed. Drink from 2024-2040.96 Read more at:https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/wine-tasting-note/?vintage=2019&wine=Domaine%20du%20Vieux%20Telegraphe%20Chateauneuf-du-Pape%20La%20Crau

(96+ points) The 2019 Chateauneuf du Pape La Crau is a hugely successful vintage, marked by scents of sun-warmed stones, garrigue, black cherries and black olives. Full-bodied, rich and velvety, it finishes with tremendous length and softly dusty tannins, which should help ensure a long, positive evolution.- JC

(94+ points) The 2019 Châteauneuf Du Pape is ruby/purple-hued and has the classic translucent color of the domaine. It's more precise and focused than the Télégramme and will need more time, but it offers a complex, gorgeous bouquet of red and black fruits, crushed stone, wild fennel, and ground pepper. Pure, medium to full-bodied, and elegant, do your best to hide bottles for 5-7 years and it's going to keep for two decades.

Silky and refined, with focused cherry puree, plum reduction and raspberry coulis notes racing through, infused subtly with rose petal, warm stone and lavender hints. Features nice perfume through the finish. Grenache, Mourvèdre, Syrah and Cinsault. Drink now through 2036. 12,000 cases made, 2,841 cases imported. — JM

Saturated ruby. Deep-pitched red/blue fruit liqueur aromas pick up suggestions of licorice, pipe tobacco and pungent flowers and herbs with air. In a lush, weighty style, offering expansive black raspberry, cherry cola, singed plum and fruitcake flavors sharpened by a jolt of spiciness on the back half. For all this wine's richness, it's energetic as well, showing solid, spice- and floral-driven persistence on the finish, which is framed by velvety, even tannins. By Josh Reynolds on September 2021