To Know It Is to Love It: Cornas

Cornas is probably the least known of all the Rhône wines. Yes, you pronounce the final S. Its zone is tiny, close to the smallest in France – 155 hectares, I think. There are single Bordeaux estates larger than that; Margaux, for instance, has 250 hectares. But if you love Rhône wines, and especially if you love the wines of the northern Rhône, you know – or should know – Cornas. The 100% Syrah wines made there stand among the great red wines of France. And this tiny appellation has a roster containing an extraordinarily high percentage of top-flight producers.
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Despite that, Cornas is a classic case of “no one’s paying attention.” André Dominé’s authoritative tome Wine scarcely mentions Cornas. Jancis Robinson’s Wine Grapes (while tying itself into ampelographical and etymological knots over the ancestry of Syrah and the origin of the grape’s name), in its almost exhaustive roster of where the variety is grown, doesn’t mention Cornas at all.

Conspiracy theorists can undoubtably discover a deep, dark plot here, but I don’t think it’s anything more sinister than the overwhelming reputation of Cornas’s nearest neighbors and rivals in Syrah: Hermitage and Cote Rôtie. Even Crôzes-Hermitage, sharing as it does the magic name, gets much more attention than Cornas. Those appellations simply use up all the space that writers and critics can allot to the northern Rhône.

(Most readers would be shocked to know how much the tyranny of page count and column inches affects the information that gets to them. I won’t go into the misinformation conveyed by fresh-out-of-college editors who know more about everything than writers who have many years of specialized expertise. Good editors are a treasure, bad ones a disaster, for both writers and readers.) But my focus here is the wines of Cornas, not the tribulations of wine writing.

The vineyards of Cornas are all steep and rocky. There’s nothing but granite on those slopes, and nothing but Syrah in the vineyards. This is a grape that can in other places make very peppery, very aggressive, sometimes even coarse wines. But here along the Rhône river, on the hillsides just south of the town of Vienne, Syrah often shows its best, giving wines with their fruit moderated into suavity and complexity, with a capacity for great bottle age and concomitant evolution.
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A Clape Cornas Vineyard

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I had the good fortune, many years ago, to make my first serious acquaintance with Cornas on a wine trip to the Rhône sponsored by Sopexa. We happy few journalists visited the then-already-legendary Auguste Clape. His wines were the pace-setters for Cornas quality, a position they continue to hold under his son and grandson, who now manage the vineyards and cellar with the same passion and precision he did. I have loved the wines of Cornas ever since that visit.

The major change that has occurred in Cornas in the decades since – besides the fact that I can no longer afford Clape’s wines – is that his example has stirred emulation in many other producers, so that now there is a whole cadre of excellent winemakers in this small appellation. That includes not only negociants like Jaboulet but also small producers such as Allemand, Verset, Balthazar, and of course Clape.

It was a Jaboulet Cornas – a 2006 – that we enjoyed the other evening with a dinner of a Poulet Marengo (recipe from Robert Courtine’s classic The Hundred Glories of French Cooking). This is a dish whose simplicity belies its delicious complexity, and it elicited the best from our mature bottle. A nose of blackberry, prune, and bramble preceded a palate of similar but more mature flavors. The wine was completely smooth in the mouth – none of the pestiferous Syrah aggression – thoroughly balanced and restrained. It finished very long indeed, all leather and plum.
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Lovely as that match was, the Cornas had been even better with the warm, cheese-rich gougère that preceded the chicken. There the wine showed itself even deeper and more velvety, so pleasurable that we almost hesitated to go on to the main course. There was even a tiny taste of pepper in the finish, just to remind us that this elegant wine really was a Syrah.

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A Pot of Beans with the Popes

When, for a recent and rare-during-Covid dinner with friends, Diane cooked up a Rabelaisian cassoulet out of Julia Child, I decided the occasion required some good southern French wines. We’ve been drinking a preponderance of Italian wines lately, and a little change of pace was in order. The austerity of Bordeaux seemed to me just wrong for the dish, as did the delicacy of Burgundy. The Rhône definitely provided the place to go.

Châteauneuf du Pape was my wine of choice, supplemented by a Cornas, a wine from a little further up the Rhône than Avignon, city of the “new château” of the 14th Century popes. To start things off, alongside a light celery, date, and almond salad, I decided to open the drinking with a white Châteauneuf, a wine of real character that I’ve always enjoyed, but that I find few people are familiar with. That unfamiliarity, from my point of view, is a real advantage, because I love to surprise my friends with a wine new to them. In this case, that gambit really paid off: Our 2015 Domaine de Beaurenard Châteauneuf du Pape blanc may well have been the wine of the evening.
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This 32-hectare, 7th-generation estate cultivates all 13 of the traditional Châteauneuf grape varieties. It is biodynamically certified, and the vines average about 45 years of age. The white is blended from Clairette, Rousanne, Bourboulenc, Grenache blanc, Picardan, and Picpoul, none of which varieties are very common outside the Rhône valley, and several of which have become rarities even within the Châteauneuf zone.

This five-year-old showed remarkable composure and complexity, having already knit its grapes together to create a rich, generous white wine that matched deliciously with everything we tasted it with. (Several of us saved some to taste alongside the cassoulet and cheese courses, where it continued to show very well indeed.) I’m partial to older white Châteauneuf, and I would guess that this wine has years, perhaps decades, of life in front of it. I hope I do too, because I’d really like to taste it again somewhere down the line.

Then we moved on to the main course. Cassoulet can be a tricky dish to match a wine with. From one point of view, it’s nothing more than a gussied up pot of pork and beans. From another, it’s one of the elaborate glories of French cuisine. And depending on the ingredient choices you make and the cooking techniques you use, the final dish can range anywhere from rustic heavy to robust elegant. It’s never a lightweight, but it isn’t necessarily ponderous either.

Thus my choice of Rhône red wines, which in themselves span the same range. Actually, Châteauneuf du Pape by itself covers that spectrum, with the number of grape varieties grown in the zone, and the many different wine styles pursued by its many makers.

Diane’s cassoulet was what I would call succulent mid-range: Julia Child’s classic technique undergirding a mélange of lamb, duck, pork, smoked sausage, and old-fashionedly flavorful marrow beans.
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A dish like that needs wines that won’t back down but are complex enough and giving enough to match nuances with each varied mouthful of the food. So the legacy of the popes’ French exile came into play to accompany a dish that I’m sure those old popes and all their attendant courtiers would have happily devoured.

We modulated to our red Châteauneuf by way of a lovely Cornas, a 2010 Domaine de Saint Pierre from Jaboulet. This comes from an almost five-hectare site at the highest point of the Cornas appellation, which Jaboulet has owned since 1993. The vines are 30 to 40 years old, and the wine is 100% Syrah, a monovarietal wine that in my mind set up a nice contrast with the multi-faceted blend of Châteauneuf.
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Contrary to this vintage’s reputation when first bottled – several critics referred to the 2010 as “savage” or “wild” – this one was positively civilized. Mouth-filling, to be sure, but smooth and gentle on the palate, with its typical Syrah pepperiness nicely balanced with sweeter wild cherry flavors. We may have drunk this bottle a bit young, but we enjoyed it thoroughly, and it set our palates up for the more complex wine to follow.

That was a 2005 Châteauneuf du Pape Vieilles Vignes – red, of course – from Domaine La Millière.
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This estate lies in the northern part of the Châteauneuf zone and has been for some years certified biodynamic. The cellar works on very traditional lines, with long barrel rest for its Châteauneufs, which are blended from Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault, and Counoise. The house’s stylistic emphasis is on finesse and longevity, both of which our bottle achieved. In fact, it may have a little overachieved: With that rich cassoulet, it seemed a little lacking in power – a delicious wine, but a touch overshadowed by the food, maybe even a bit of an anti-climax, following the impressive white Châteauneuf and the delightful Cornas. But it still showed plenty of freshness and depth, and it perked up considerably when confronted with an array of cheeses.

Those pre-Renaissance popes may not have been models of piety, but they certainly had a good eye for a vineyard.

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