The Wines of Côte-Rôtie

Go to the northernmost part of the Rhone River Valley in France and you arrive in Côte-Rôtie, a tiny Appellation d'origine Contrôlée (AOC) once considered almost a waste of space in the world of wine. Even into the 1970s, quite modern by French wine standards, Côte-Rôtie wines were largely thrown together by negociants, wine merchants who buy grapes or even the juice after pressing of many different vintages and parcels and blend them together. Sometimes, they get praiseworthy wines and sometimes they are flat out undrinkable.

It's not an AOC like Chateuneuf du Pape where winemakers can make their names through blending of a dozen or more varietals. In Côte-Rôtie, they are limited to just two -- Syrah and Viognier with the Viognier not exceeding 20% of the total. And, to add to the difficulty of producing wine of the Côte-Rôtie AOC, the Syrah and Viognier must be cofermented, i.e., fermented together.

Translated literally, Côte-Rôtie means roasted slope. Côte-Rôtie sits at a significant bend in the Rhone. Fortuitously the schist soil on the hillside slopes along the river face to the southeast maximizing the early day sunlight and increasing the ability of the grapes to ripen quickly and with a fair amount of intensity. At the same time, the position of the slopes is just perfect to shield the vines from the cold wines coming from the northwest.

The wines of Côte-Rôtie tend to be fairly pricey. This is not simply because they can be remarkable wines, but because they are very difficult to produce. These hillsides are not just sloped, but they are so steeply sloped that winches need to be used to train the vines that use single Guyot (one spur and one cane) to hold them in place.

What makes these wines so special is two-fold -- their ageworthiness and their flavor complexity. If you can hold out, don't drink Côte-Rôtie younger than about 10 years after vintage. Why? It takes that long for the oddly complementary harmony of the two grapes -- one red and one white -- to fully exhibit their special characteristics. 

If you are fortunate enough to find Côte-Rôtie from one of the great vintages and patient enough to have waited, what you will find are the floral aromas of the Viognier neatly wrapped around the bacon of the Syrah from this far north in the Rhone Valley. If you drink it younger, however, what you will often get is cured meat with a bit of effervescence, similar to what you often find in far less regulated blends of this sort from Barossa Valley, Australia.

Drink Côte-Rôtie with beef or lamb and prepare the meat in a stew or as a roast, or just throw it on the gtill.  In France, the classic pairing is Cassoulet and French onion soup. Seems awfully simple for a wine that may cost you several hundred dollars per bottle, doesn't it?



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