Château-Grillet

Château-Grillet is a single-estate appellation in the northern Rhône, its vines forming an amphitheatre above the river between Vérin and Saint-Michel-sur-Rhône. Only Viognier has been planted here since the appellation was created in 1936, and the estate has belonged to the Pinault family's Artémis Domaines since 2011.

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The appellation of Château-Grillet was established in 1936 and is one of the smallest in France, an island entirely enclosed within the larger Condrieu appellation. The estate's reputation goes back centuries: Thomas Jefferson visited in 1787, and an 1814 inventory of the cellar at Malmaison, home of Empress Joséphine, listed 296 bottles of Château-Grillet among the best wines it held. In 1829 the London auctioneer James Christie bought bottles of the wine for King George IV of England. In the twentieth century the chef Fernand Point championed it at his restaurant La Pyramide in Vienne, and the critic Curnonsky ranked it among the five best white wines in the world, alongside Montrachet, Coulée de Serrant, Château d'Yquem and Château-Chalon. The estate was bought by the Pinault family in 2011 and is now part of Artémis Domaines.

The vineyard covers about 4 hectares in a single block, terraced across steep granite slopes between 150 and 250 metres above the Rhône and held up by dry-stone walls. Viognier is the only grape planted, rooted in granite soil that helps the vines find water even in dry years. Grapes are picked by hand in small crates and sorted in the vineyard; pruning follows the simple guyot method. After gentle pressing and fermentation plot by plot, the wine ages for 18 months in barrel on its fine lees.

Our Château-Grillet range at Dynamic Cellars spans three vintages, 2006, 2008 and 2009. For more from the northern Rhône, see our Rhône Valley wines and Condrieu collections, or browse white wines from across the cellar.