Jean-Michel Sorrel Herm. Rouge Le Vignon 2018

The Sorrel family first set root in Hermitage in 1893, when estate founder Félix Alexandre Sorrel purchased land in ‘Les Bessards.’ Today, the family’s third generation of winemakers—indeed, three Sorrel brothers (Jacques, Jean-Michel and Bruno, or JMB)—tend the family’s modest six acres of land, crafting but a handful of bottles each vintage. Plowing by horse, picking by hand, aging in older barrels; here the traditions of Hermitage are as alive and treasured as they were centuries ago. The brothers’ Hermitage wines are stately yet supple, utterly refined in aroma and texture and crucially, wonderfully long-lived.