Châteauneuf-du-Pape

The word on the neck of this bottle causes endless confusion. "RESERVE" is printed there above the vintage, and English-language sellers routinely turn it into a cuvée called "Reserve", sometimes explaining it as a selection of the best fruit from every plot. The estate's own list of wines does not support that: Château Rayas bottles a red and a white under its own name, plus Pignan, Fonsalette and Pialade. There is one red Château Rayas, and this is it.

The estate sits in the north of the appellation, set back among woods, and its character comes from that siting. The soil is very sandy and poor, fine sand and silt over a friable conglomerate the locals call safre, over water-retentive clay - none of the big rolled galets that appear in every photograph of Châteauneuf. The vines face largely north, the surrounding forest shades them and channels breezes, and the fruit ripens in a cooler pocket than its neighbours. Planting density is low, around 2,500 vines per hectare, well under the appellation norm. Vine age is mixed on purpose: Emmanuel Reynaud said they replaced dead vines every five years because a mix of ages gives complexity, which cuts against the usual ancient-vines framing. The estate gives ten hectares of red vines within a holding that outside accounts put at around twelve. Yields are famously low, reported at 10 to 20 hl/ha, and the red is 100% Grenache in an appellation that permits thirteen varieties and where nearly everyone blends.

How it is actually made is far less settled than the mythology suggests. The few detailed accounts that exist disagree on whether fermentation happens in steel, in concrete or on whole bunches, and on whether maceration runs two weeks or four. They agree only on indigenous yeasts, no new oak, very old vessels and roughly two years of élevage, which is as far as this description will go.

2010 is regarded as one of the great recent southern Rhône vintages. A cold wet winter and a cool, disrupted spring gave way to a hot dry summer, and coulure hit Grenache hard - some estates lost as much as 40% of the crop and compensated by leaning on Mourvèdre and Syrah, an option a pure Grenache wine does not have. The appellation averaged 27 hl/ha against a permitted 35, and its own summary of the year was low volumes at very high quality, with warm days and cool nights. This bottle is labelled 15%.

Emmanuel Reynaud took over in 1997 after the sudden death of his uncle Jacques, and died on 25 November 2025, aged 61, after a long illness. The family estates passed to two of his sons, Benoît and Louis-Damien, in a succession reported as long planned.