WTN: Cornas

Deep garnet red wine with a funky northern Rhone nose of earthy almost barnyardy fragrance and dark fruit, especially blackberry. Midpalate delivers what the nose promises with shitake mushrooms, blackberries, balancing acidity and tannins that give you that luscious mouthfeel we all look for in a wine. A medium-long finish of funky dark fruit.

Food match: Moroccan lentil soup with chorizo. This wine just lights up with this dish as the dark fruit comes to the front with tangy blackberries and pepper notes being accentuated. The wine seems to especially mesh well with the earthy cinnamon and cumin flavors of the soup. The food tames the tannins a bit and smooths out this wine so that it just says, I love food! If anyone requests it, I will post the recipe.

Wine: 2010 Brise Cailloux Cornas, by Matthieu Barret, 100% syrah, 13.5% abv. Hand carried by a friend back from France. A great gift!

[David M. Bueker]

Nice! I can't wait for cool weather to try the recipe.

Indeed. And I've been afraid to open 09-12 wines of stature from the Northern Rhone right now out of fear of punishment, but sounds like this one delivered.

Rahsaan,

I will say this wine was a bit tannic at first sip, but it opened up nicely, especially with the food. The lentil soup was quite spicy too as it had a spicy curry base, plus a hot chile pepper (Hungarian wax) added to it.

Yes, please do post the recipe.

Weather perfect for this up here .

Thanks for the tasting note. Cornas used to be one of my favorites from the Northern Rhone before it became so popular. Now I can rarely find it, and when I do find it I the price is too painful.

-Paul W.

Old style Cornas tended to be dark, hard and needed a long aging time. I recently finished up my store of 1991, a vintage often overlooked by buyers simplify because they get brainwashed into thinking that if it isn't a good vintage in Bordeaux, it just isn't a good vintage.

A lot of producers switched styles at least a bit and by the late 1990s an earlier maturing earlier drinking style seems to have emerged. Pleasant, but not like the traditional style.

I'd liken that evolution to what has happened with Priorat. In the 1970s, you literally couldn't see through a Priorat for at least a decade. Now you can by high priced Priorats that look like frickin' Burgundies at an early age! For those of us that prefer traditional styles of wines this is not progress!

Ditto Cahors - I opened a Cahors that was almost like Beaujolais a while ago. They stuff so much merlot into it in order to sell it early that there are few 100% Malbec Cahors wines any more.

I think the world is losing its 'grip'!

Pardon my rant - I have been thinking dark thoughts about producers that no longer make dark wines for some time and you just set me off.