Given the warm growing season and a very light crop (well under 2 tons to the acre), we picked these 129-year-old vines on September 7th, the earliest ever.  Normally we do a small amount of whole-cluster on this wine but in this vintage, we opted to fully destem as some of the rachises (i.e., stems) were just a little too beat up from the heat.  Mourvèdre is actually quite fastidious.  It wants heat to fully ripen but without adequate water, portions of or even entire clusters will wither into hard scrabble during a heatwave.  Hence why Châteauneuf-du-Pape producers plant Mourvèdre in clay-based soils.  As usual, bottled unfined and unfiltered.