The Wine Blokes

We had some friends over for dinner the other night and and we tasted some nice Australian wines from the Adelaide Hills, but everyone has tasted them before and someone asked me if I had something a little unique or different in the cellar. I rember tasting some weird and wonderful wines from the Cornas Appellation of the Rhone a few years ago when I was there to work vintage.

The following paragraphs by Eric Asimov of the Internatioanl Herald Tribune sum up Cornas:

Years after Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie achieved enviable status as objects of desire, Cornas was regarded as their bumpkin cousin, powerful yet rustic, perhaps embarrassing to introduce in polite company. Yet in the last 20 years or so a new Cornas has emerged, not so much rustic as wild, with captivating aromas of flowers and fruits, olives and bacon and herbs.

The town and vineyards of Cornas occupy a kind of amphitheater west of the Rhone, just northwest of Valence. The southeast-facing vines, planted on granite slopes, are protected from the cooling river winds, and as the southernmost red wine appellation of the northern Rhone, Cornas is considerably warmer than Hermitage or Côte-Rôtie, which explains its burly character. Yet I think its ferocity is exaggerated. Only rarely do the wines exceed 14 percent alcohol, while improvements in winemaking and viticulture have relieved Cornas of much of its fabled rusticity.

With only about 105 hectares, or 260 acres, of syrah, there’s not a lot of Cornas to go around. And even that has come under threat recently, as a proposal to build housing on about 4 hectares of the best vineyards has moved ahead, despite considerable opposition. More tribulations for a land well used to them.

The only Cornas I had in the cellar was a Gabriel Meffre Laurus. I have to admit it wasn’t the greatest wine, but what we all loved was how unique and, rustic it really was, and suprisingly, very very powerful. It was a little volatile and had some other issues with soundness, but, it was enjoyable nonetheless compared to the over ripe, jammy, ballsy Australian red we were also drinking, that was big, but lacked substance.

It had us all wondering why in some of the cooler regions of Australia someone can’t make wine with this type of character and complexity. I must admit there are some botique guys working on these type of wines in areas such as Mt Barker in Western Australia, and to some extent in SA and Vic, but they are few and far between.

Lets hope in coming vintages we see some emerge with fervour.