The 2023 Cros Parantoux from Méo amply demonstrates why this site is so highly regarded. Boasting dense, ripe blackberry fruit aromas with notes of rose petal, liquorice, and earth, there is great complexity already on the nose. The texture demonstrates, however, that this will only expand with time. There is an impressive concentration on the palate – the wine feels tightly wound and tannic, yet it seems to deliver a silky caress at the same time. 'Not far behind the Richebourg,' in the words of Jean-Nicolas Méo.(CC)

Cros Parantoux can often be a beautifully red fruity wine in the cellars chez Méo, but this year, it is awash in the same lovely black fruity tones as all of its stable mates. The wine’s aromatic constellation is pure and stunning, offering up scents of plums, black cherries, black raspberries, duck, a complex foundation of soil elements, Vosne spices, woodsmoke and cedary new oak. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied, precise and sappy down to the core, with great soil signature, buried, suave tannins, tangy acids and lovely length and grip on the seamlessly balanced and complex finish. Great juice. 2040-2100.

This is a more rugged Crox Parantoux than usual—a bit more in the typical Rouget style. It's picked late (it's a chilly site), aged entirely in new oak, and it has some vaguely coarse tannins that need time to better mesh with the solid, black fruit core. Savory spices light up the substantial finish. The 0.3 ha were planted in the 1960s and Jean-Nicolas' father brought the vines back into the domaine in 1969.