The Best of Cote Rotie

I keep forgetting how much I like Syrah from the Northern Rhone, and how much it is not a wine from the south even though the word Rhone tends to make me think in that direction.  After all, a series of recently drunk bottles of Cote Rotie and Cornas from 2006 to 2010 all weighed in at 12.5 to 13%, less than a bottle of Chambolle-Musigny or most Chablis and back to the good ole days of Bordeaux last century. Again, it’s easy to presume Syrah is a southern heavyweight, but not at all, or not always.

But I do find Syrah complicated, doubtless due to my own lack of knowledge. A generous friend (with an Australian wife) has served me the occasional bottle of Penfolds Grange (Grange Hermitage as I seem to remember it used to be called prior to 1989) and though I fully recognise that it’s an impressive wine, its inky dark dense rich fruitiness is not really to my taste. Fabulous but too much, voluptuous power overarching any subtle nuance. If you then jump back to the original Hermitage over here, sometimes it can be wonderful, but then it can also be dense, impenetrable and rather like a block of stone. It also carries a tick more alcohol and price, and much that I admire Jean-Louis Chave, his wines are now sadly beyond most folks’ budgets, and to be brutally honest I’ll be senile or dead by the time his recent reds reach their peak anyway.

When I first went down to the Northern Rhone, thirty odd years ago, Guigal was all the rage and the wines of Cornas were considered rustic plonk for those who couldn’t afford the real stuff (Cote Rotie or Hermitage). Chewy tannic and rough. How times have changed. Famed US star sommelier turned winemaker Rajat Parr now rates Thierry Allemand in Cornas as his favourite winemaker. Full stop. Indeed, some would say that the top wines of Cornas are up in the pantheon with Chave’s Hermitage and frankly cruising above Cote Rotie. From our experience, I’d not disagree. But some of the masters (Verset, Juge) are gone, Allemand has joined Chave in the pricing ether and Clape is hard to find. And, yes, again, when I try to find more affordable but serious Cornas I often fall upon wines that are too dense and fleshy, Syrah with the weight and structure of Bordeaux and tending towards the monolithic.

But for this piece, I’ll concentrate on Cote Rotie which has plenty of single vineyards, and an interesting history to boot. It also flies one luxury-priced standard bearer, Guigal, which does not worry me a jot as the fabled ‘La La’s’ (La Landonne, La Turque and La Mouline) are not for me. I sold the few I had left. I know they garner more 100-point scores than almost any other wines, but I find excess extraction and a ton of new oak masks the beauty of Syrah. Way too much make up. So, I happily leave it to the US critics to swoon and presumably their bank managers too. Leave the rest of the wines to us…

It's interesting – nobody loves modern (top) Bordeaux anymore as it’s become too corporate and too concerned with marketing and point scores. A few recently drunk 2005/2009/2010s also rather supported the view that the new era winemaking had an eye on the fact that big ripe soft wines do well in the mega en primeur tastings and score higher points which of course garner high prices. But the wines 15 years on are not so balanced or enticing.

And so everyone has flocked to the sanctified monastic temple of terroir in Burgundy. But with limited supply and ever-increasing demand, the prices have lost touch with reality and so all those looking for terroir and authenticity had to find a new passion. And many of them rushed off to Barolo – finding in Nebbiolo a similar single grape variety with perfumed aromatics and a kaleidoscopic patchwork of hillside terroirs (far more so than in Burgundy if you consider the greater range in altitude and the 360 degrees of compass exposition).

I plead guilty, but in doing so, on my way from Beaune down the motorway, I drove past a vertiginous set of terraced vineyards, much closer to Burgundy than Piemonte. And one grape, a multiplicity of vineyards, mainly family owned and coming in at a very unBarolo-like 12-5-13.5%.  Why did everyone forsake Burgundy and rush to Barolo, ignoring the similarly perfect terroir of Cote Rotie?

(Okay, Cote Rotie can include the white Viognier grape, star of neighbouring Condrieu, but the amount is usually minimal, so I am considering this a monovarietal area to keep things simpler).

I think the top Rhone specialist is a Brit, John Livingstone-Learmouth, who makes it all seem so obvious when he called Cote Rotie ‘the bridge between Burgundy and the Rhone’. Geographically it is indeed the first part of the Rhone vineyards that you see heading south (along with Condrieu), but I think it’s far more than the mileage proximity – it’s the whole profile of the wines that nods more to the north than the south. It sits on the west (right) bank of the Rhone above Ampuis and stretches for six miles, though due to the need for crampons and a pickaxe only 300 hectares can be (wine) farmed. Sixty-degree inclines are not for the faint hearted. No mechanical picking here.

But like Barolo, when I was born maybe only about a fifth of that potential was planted to vines – crops and fruit made more money than grapes. Phylloxera, war, the Depression and those impossible slopes meant that apricots sold for twice the price of grapes. A few heroic growers kept at it (Dervieux, Gentaz, Jasmin, Barge, Champet) but by the war it was pretty much only Joseph Vidal-Fleury who kept the flame alive. He had a young worker named Etienne Guigal who branched out on his own in 1946 and ended buying Vidal-Fleury in 1984 and, yes, you have to salute him for hanging in there and dragging Cote Rotie into the public limelight. Now it’s difficult to imagine an almost subsistence economy in what is such a famous wine producing region. Replant your single vineyard to apricot trees? It’s much less work…

In the ‘80s only a third of the hectares were planted (the size of one large Bordeaux chateau!) and it was Guigal and Dervieux who started individual vineyard bottlings. And then in 1987, after tasting Guigal and Rostaing’s (Dervieux’s son in law) wines a certain Robert Parker announced the 1985’s ‘the most dramatic, intense wines I have tasted since my first tasting of 1982 Bordeaux reds.’ And I guess the rest is history. From rags to riches in literally one generation.

Like Burgundy, Cote Rotie is notionally split into two cotes – Brune (the larger) and Blonde, each with their own lieux-dits or named vineyards. The northern part (Brune) is more iron rich schist, and the south is paler granite schist (a bit like the Brune and Blonde sides of the grand cru Bonnes Mares in Chambolle/Morey Saint Denis, but that’s on limestone). And it’s not just the colour of the earth that changes as the Brune wines are more tannic, powerful and age worthy (with sometimes I think a resemblance across the river towards Hermitage) and the Blonde more delicate and perfumed.

If you want some of the more famous vineyards within the two regions you have La Landonne, La Turque, Rozier, Les Grandes Places, Vialliere and Cote Brune up north and La Mouline and Cote Blonde further south.

But in parallel with Hermitage and Barolo, like Chave and Bartolo Mascarello, there are also traditionalists who prefer to blend their vineyards such as Jamet, Burgaud and Jasmin. The last two are very well priced and elegant, soft wines, juicy and pure fruited. Burgaud is a personal favourite, and I just loaded up on the 2022 for under 50 euros which is an unreal bargain in today’s crazy wine world.

Many would say that Jamet is the true king, especially his ‘basic’ blended Cote Rotie that includes 25 plots across 17 named vineyards, all but 2 in Brune, and is a wine I try to buy every vintage. And, another advantage, I reckon that at 15 years old you are on the optimum drinking plateau, unlike some grand cru Burgundy or top Barolo which need 20 plus. And always that lower alcohol, elegance and juicy acidity mixed with a thick Syrah texture and fruit that does have a sunny smile to it. Jamet also produces a legendary Cote Brune and now La Landonne, but alas I’m unlikely ever to taste either. (By the way his basic white and red Cote du Rhones are also good and of course more affordable).

If the 1990’s saw Parker trumpeting the glories of the best Cote Rotie vineyards, leading to high scores, higher prices, happy replanting and, at last, economic sustainability, it was not all positive. Just like in Barolo where the ‘wars’ were waging between the traditionalists and the modern fashion chasers, in Cote Rotie the traditional blended wines with low extraction, low alcohol, low new oak and the inclusion of whole cluster stems were slipping out of fashion. In the desire for those points, grapes were picked later and riper, old barrels replaced with new, stems stripped out and extraction increased. That delicacy, that velvety texture, that refreshing acidity and purity were gone. The make-up was being caked on.

But not all gave in to the siren calls and nowadays perhaps (as in Barolo) the pendulum is swinging back and the exaggerations and divisions of the past coming together. Certainly, the wines we have tasted over the recent years are all made with elegance and tradition and, I think nearly all with stems.

We’ve already mentioned the marvellous Jamet blend and the great value Burgaud and also good Jasmin (I think the only destemmer). So, without breaking the bank, here are some of the single vineyards that also hit the spot. In the Cote Brune, both Clusel Roch’s and Gerin produce Vialliere and Les Grandes Places, not at all at stupid prices and though they are a bit fleshier and have perhaps a touch more oak, they retain all the elegance, freshness and balance a Cote Rotie should have. Barge’s Cote Brune (they also produce several lieux-dits in the Cote Blonde) is a fine example of what makes traditional Cote Rotie so compelling (and frankly softens that Brune-Blonde line in the schist as it’s far from fleshy, masculine or heavy). The 2011, a lighter vintage, showed a slightly faded red and classic nose: tarry, a touch of roast nut and plenty of fruit that had melded together with time. The texture was thick and soft, gently chewy and the finish had that lovely orangey acidity you find in top Cote Rotie. Whole cluster, old vines, old oak, gentle extraction. Spot on, balanced, very tasty and still just a digestible 12.5%.

Rostaing has two of the greats – La Landonne and Cote Blonde. I suspect that the former may be the best-known vineyard in the whole of Cote Rotie, but I find it often just a bit too masculine. Livingstone-Learmouth comments that Cote Rotie is closer to Burgundy than Hermitage in style, but I’m not so sure about La Landonne. It is certainly the alpha male of the slopes, though Rostaing’s is not over oaked or flamboyant. But (perhaps as someone who really does love the softer side of Burgundy), for me the star vineyard has to be Cote Blonde – the 2001 and, surprisingly the 2003 heatwave vintage, both had fabulous perfumed red fruit, a soft silky texture and that uplifting, almost orangey acidity. Though all of the above-mentioned wines are seriously good, on my desert island I guess I’d plump for Jamet’s blended Cote Rotie and Rostaing’s Cote Blonde, I think both retailing around the 150-euro mark, certainly not cheap, but a bargain compared to Guigal’s La Las, top Barolo and almost any named cru from the Cote de Nuits in Burgundy.

Whatever you prefer, there is a lot of terroir and elegance to find in Cote Rotie, with alcohols that still seem somehow to defy global warming, a more northern than Mediterranean profile and, for the main part, prices that have not tried to catch on to the Burgundy bandwagon.

Not yet.

Long may it last!