2017 Guy Farge Saint-Joseph Rouge Terroir de Granit 750 ml

The 2017 Guy Farge Saint-Joseph Terroir de Granit boasts the kind of generous red fruit, telltale cracked pepper, and unmistakable granite minerality that makes Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie reds some of the world’s most regal and cherished bottles. Yet Guy Farge manages to coax chart-topping flavor and complexity out of his Saint-Joseph terroir for half the price. 

Our absolutely killer price of $32 per bottle should attract any red wine lover to this 94-point Saint-Joseph, which hails from one of the most undersung appellations in the Rhône. When we first saw its inky opaque purple hue in the glass, smelled its cornucopia of red fruit with anise, graphite, and olive tapenade notes, and contemplated the long finish, we could have sworn we were in the presence of a Rhône heavy hitter with a triple-digit price. It felt great to be wrong. 

Guy Farge’s family has had grape growing down for a century. Starting in 1920 with a domaine of just 30 acres, they sold their stellar fruit for two generations: first to the cooperative Cave de Tain, then to the Northern Rhône powerhouse Delas Frères. But in 2007, Guy Farge started bottling his own cuvées from his family’s first-class terroir just across the river from Hermitage in Saint-Jean-de-Muzols.

Saint-Jean-de-Muzols is one of the six “naturally favored communes” of the sprawling Saint-Joseph appellation, according to Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson in the World Atlas of Wine. Those communes are where steep granitic slopes similar, to those of Hermitage produce “fresh, smoky, terroir-driven reds” that constitute some of the Northern Rhône’s “greatest bargains.” 

The details of Farge’s wines are suspiciously similar to the types of wines for which you’d pay two or three times as much. The Syrah grows organically on steep granite hillsides, which are plowed by horses, and give the wine an amazing mineral throughline. The wine is then softened by a full year in used 400-liter oak barrels. 

The result is the kind of Northern Rhône beauty whose complexity and character had us in awe—and checking and rechecking the price. With quality befitting a blue-chip appellation and a price that barely tops that of a good Côtes du Rhône, this is a cellar-builder of the first order.