2011 Domaine Mathilde et Yves Gangloff Condrieu

I love Gangloff’s wines. Two years ago I tasted his line at Découvertes en Vallée du Rhône, the biennial wine fair in the Rhône Valley (which is coincidentally repeating this week). Later that day, at a party for journalists and buyers and winemakers and other hangers-on, we rocked out to covers by Gangloff and confrères, who constitute a band (because why not?). Find that memory here.

Gangloff’s wines are a fey, bewitching mix: concentrated and precise, fruit-saturated and minerally, old-school and au courant. I adore them. I tasted this particular bottle last week at dinner in Paris. The restaurant’s wine list offered both the 2011 and 2012 vintages, and I selected the older wine, relieved by the knowing nod from the sommelier.

The wine was an elixir: expansively perfumed, redolent of apricots and lemon oil, an orchard of stone and pome fruits, fresh herbs, dried herbs, green tea, and tarragon. But into this sunlit fruit a rock was dropped, an element of slate and wet stone, the smell of marble after rain. The figure of the wine offered dried apricots and ginger, beeswax, honeysuckle, spiced pears, more fruit, more rocks, minerals, herbs. The finish was languid, sensual, and forever.

We paired it with pumpkin soup scattered with hazelnuts. Does it get any better?

14% abv | €120 at a restaurant in Paris; about $80 retail in the U.S.