Champet Côte-Rôtie La Viallière 2017

92+ points John Gilman (View From the Cellar): "The 2017 Côte-Rôtie 'la Viallière' from Domaine Champet is beautifully classical in profile, coming in at a low octane of 12.5 percent (very impressive for the vintage!) and offering up a properly structured and soil-driven example of this great terroir. The youthful nose offers up scents of sweet cassis, spit-roasted game, complex, stony soil tones, pepper, woodsmoke, coffee, violets and a nice touch of adolescent, old school stemminess in the upper register. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and tightly-knit today, with an excellent core of fruit, fine soil signature, firm, chewy tannins and a long, promising and still quite primary finish. This is not quite as perfectly ripe as the 2016 version and will be a tad less generous in its youth as a result, but in the fullness of time, this too should prove to be an excellent wine. That said, it is likely to be far less forgiving if one is tempted to open it up early 'just to see how it is doing'. 2030-2075. (Mar/Apr 2019)"