TN: Gangloff 1998 Cote Rotie - Les Sereines Noir

This bottle was bought for $42 on release and was the only Gangloff wine I purchased from the vintage. I may have spelled the bottling name incorrectly. The bottle was served on a rather cool SoCal Saturday evening in a buffet tasting party of eleven wines and appetizers, being paired alongside warm tartlettes of onion, fingerling potatoes, home-smoked pork shoulder and Saint Alban cheese.

The tartlettes were a home run but the wine ...

Color was dark ruby red with just a touch of lightening at edge. Aromas were fairly muted initally, opening gradually over three hours to show just simple raspberry fruit and little garrigue. Flavors were quite tightly-bound in an acid and tannin fist fight; I chilled the wine slightly after one hour open (in an ice water bath for about 15 minutes) to see if a cooler serving temp would aid its showing. Unfortunately this produced little effect. The wine finished in an abrupt wash of tannin, leaving the mouth quite dry. It was distinctly, ummm - not popular.

I would not have been surprised for this wine to show like this at age 5 years. However, many 1998s from the region have been showing more aromatic development and tannin softening than this. The vivid floral character (when not overwhelmed with oak) that sometimes draws me to M. Gangloff's wines were missing in action.

I would not have been surprised for this wine to show like this at age 5 years. However, many 1998s from the region have been showing more aromatic development and tannin softening than this. The vivid floral character (when not overwhelmed with oak) that sometimes draws me to M. Gangloff's wines were missing in action.

I don't know much about Gangloff but is this intended for longer aging?

Well, I rarely know what a winemaker's intentions are, but here the label does gives us a hint, right ? If Gangloff used mostly one of the the old sereine variants as we would believe, we would also like to see fulfilled that parallel promise of balanced concentration in terms of structure, color, aroma, and flavor dimension - over the bigger berry, higher yielding clones.

My experience with 1998 Cote Roties in general indicate a vintage pattern of carrying a rather "stiffer-than average" acid and tannin build with good concentration of fruit. But this example seemed very spiny and too underfilled; maybe some folks would also call it concentrated and see it as highly likely to show better later, but I wouldn't. Perhaps the 1998 C-R Chavaroche from Levet was more severe than this, but the comparision is probably apt. This Gangloff shows a '98 vintage pattern in the extreme for me, at least when compared with bottlings recently opened from Barge, Champet, Gallet, Ogier, Jasmin, Guigal and Jamet (including his regular, his Brune and his late-rereleased regular bottling).

By comparison, last evening we opened Gangloff's 1995 C-R for accompaniment to another round of tartlettes . It is still drinking quite fat and well today, which is interesting. We have never seen it in a dumb period despite that vintage's famed reputation for structured wine. I saw only one bottling in release here from 1995. So I haven't followed Gangloff much; his prices became rather high for the quality (and the '95 was dang good) around here especially compared to Messrs. Gallet, Jasmin and Jamet.