We resisted importing Châteauneuf-du-Pape for years, wary of an appellation that so often trades solely on its name, until Domaine du Banneret won us over. The Banneret name is inherited: a medieval knight ranked high enough to lead men into battle under his own banner was a ‘banneret.’ The coat of arms on the label belongs to Jean-Claude Vidal's ancestors, who hold documents on this land back to 1405. (Jean-Claude, as it happens, is the uncle of Jean-Marc Espinasse, who founded our Domaine Rouge-Bleu.) An architect by training, he took the tiny estate over in 1989, and made his first vintages in the cellar of his boyhood friend Henri Bonneau, whose traditionalism (and that of Jacques Reynaud at Rayas) shaped the house style. His daughter Audrey has run things since 2014, and farms all thirteen authorized varieties co-planted across nine parcels around the château ruins. The wine is elegantly built to last, a world away from the smoothed-out fruit-bombs so much of the appellation now favors. Decanter called a mature vintage one of the finest Châteauneufs ever consumed.