Burgundy ranks its vineyards and Champagne rates its villages. The Northern Rhône never did. We scored every named site on what it is made of and how it sits: rock, slope, aspect, height, shelter, sun. No prices, no critics, no names. The ranking that comes back does not follow the famous labels.
Each site carries one score out of 10 for the place itself; the vintage is added when you name a year. Nothing you can buy moves a score: not a price, not a critic, not an owner.
Hermitage is the name the world knows, and its best ground is superb: its top site scores 7.12. But the appellation also runs down onto flat river ground, and its 20 sites span 3.06 to 7.12, so its middle site scores only 5.13. Ranked by average, Hermitage comes 7th of 8; Château-Grillet leads at 6.68.
Across the river, 474 Saint-Joseph sites and 102 Crozes-Hermitage sites score above that Hermitage middle. Some of the best ground in the valley wears its least expensive names.
Crozes-Hermitage runs from 2.14 to 7.54 across 312 sites. The best site in the cheapest appellation outscores the average of the dearest. The worst sits on the river floor, and the name on the label says nothing about which one is in your glass.
That is why a bottle gets scored on its site when we can place it there, and only falls back to the appellation when we cannot.
924 sites stand on granite, gneiss or schist, the ancient rock of the valley's western wall; they average 6.08. The 273 sites on the sands and gravels the river left behind average 4.15. Slope tells the same story: the flattest sites average 3.99, the sites steeper than 25 degrees average 6.69.
Place is eight-tenths of a wine's score; the year is the last two. The twelve most recent vintages, 2024 back to 2013.
The score, the ground it stands on, the year, and what else on the shelf stands on better ground for less. Free, no account. Merchants: put it on your list and every guest gets the same answer.
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