001-034 15802 9/21/05 9:45 PM Page 1 INTRODUCTION The northern Rhône faces the twenty-first cen- vations, and the new “cure in a sachet” methods tury with its tail apparently up. For so long the proposed by ministries and chemical compa- poor cousin of the grandee regions of Bordeaux, nies alike. It was also an age of innocence com- Burgundy, and Champagne, it is now an estab- pared to today. Growers were happy to spend lished source of fine wine, its dominant Syrah half a day explaining and talking to a young and Viognier varieties much in demand around investigator. The veterans and the wise were the world. Vineyards are being revived from the modest and viewed their work as nothing spe- ghosts of the past on its hillsides, often after cially elevated, their reasoning entrenched in many decades of abandonment. Prices for the the context of the long-term. wines are high, the sturdy economics of the area The 1980s were the decade spent indoors. visible through tidied-up towns, restored houses, Scales had started to fall off eyes, and with the and smart cellar complexes. vineyard safely under control from magic Since the early 1970s, the transformation has potions, attention could be turned to whizzy been enormous—those were days when so few new machinery that made vinification easier. people bottled their own domaine wine that a Easier, note, not better. The years 1982–85 sleuthing visit to the Post Office was obligatory forced growers’ hands, anyway. The first of the to find out who those growers might be. There hot late summer seasons in 1982 led to tear- was no official information office, there were no away fermentations and the immediate risk of maps, no signposts. There wasn’t much export, volatile wines—previously a humming back- and no press coverage apart from lyrical ground factor, not a front-row one. Cooling accounts of the annual wine fair opened by His equipment that was more than a hose pipe of Honour the Mayor. lukewarm water was required. Then new vats, This was also the period when vineyard care then new techniques, and so on. stood on the cusp between the ancient time- Some of these changes were advances. intensive practices of a generation that had lived Destemming when stalks were not fully ripened, through the Second World War and all its depri- even though that judgment was more empyrical 1 001-034 15802 9/21/05 9:45 PM Page 2 its new footing in the world of wine. The north- “Where is the truth? The truth is in the old ern Rhône is so different from the southern bottles—before notoriety came along, with Rhône that its closest proxy in many ways is all the coverage and the modern methods.” Burgundy. Its terroir is superb, the geology of Gérard Chave, Hermitage millions of years ago providing a fascinating complex underlay for most of the vineyards. Indeed, its geology is more diverse than that of Burgundy—the clash of the Massif Central with then than it is today, became more common, the Alps and the presence of its powerful river and so greatly helped the quality of many an in past and present shape bringing a wonder- uninspired vigneron. The outright cooling of cel- ful array of shifts and surprises within a single lars and a severe clampdown on temperature hillside. extremes developed from the practice of cooling The hillsides themselves are proper slopes, individual vats. Old casks lined thick with tar- not gently rolling ones. Stiff ledges that require trates were thrown out by the sensible. Chestnut bon oeil, bon pied, bon dos—good eye, good foot, gave way to oak. good back—form the men and women who But somewhere a line had to be drawn, and work them, and sculpt their outlooks into a life became a touch too easy for some growers, gritty realism. It’s easier to sit on a tractor than who allowed a restlessness of spirit to sink into spend the day puffing up and sliding down the the cosy comfort of a cruise control sofa. Conse- schist. quently, there are now only a few sages still There is a single variety, too. As Burgundy present in the northern Rhône, and while there has the Pinot Noir at the northern limit of its never were many, their number diminishes ripening, so the northern Rhône has the Syrah rather than grows. at the northern limit of its ripening. The crossroads facing this region now is how Like Burgundy, plots are tiny. Men return to to produce good-quality wine that is authentic Cornas from successful careers elsewhere when and acceptable to a better- and better-informed they can take over the family’s sole hectare public, one that is also bombarded with choice. of vines. Holding an are or two—100 or 200 The wine’s price must therefore be compet- square metres—at Hermitage is announced itive, even though its origins—noble as they with pride and jealously guarded. A grower like may be—denote difficulty and obstruction. Jean-Paul Jamet at Côte-Rôtie can talk of his Scrabbling around an incline of 60° to produce eight hectares being made up of 25 plots on 17 a bottle of wine that sells for under 20 dollars is different lieux-dits, or sites. not likely to keep body and soul together for There is therefore much to explore, a world long. of charting and logging the realities and charac- While hillsides in 2004–05 were dotted with teristics of the land, land that has held vineyards yellow machines clearing, digging, and opening since Roman times. Still, local usage and up old sites, down in the cellars on the plains description vary from person to the next. A there is a collective apprehension about how to stream has two or three different names, a vine- sell the wine if two or three bountiful vintages yard a couple of sobriquets; some cartographers’ in a row came along. Only a few are spared such names for places are not even known to the peo- thoughts—the best names in the best places, a ple who live and work there. roster that includes Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, and But back to the land and the people who Cornas, and that excludes St-Joseph, Crozes- work it. That is where the truth lies. In the cor- Hermitage, St-Péray, and even Condrieu. ner of every bottle of wine there resides a piece Communication is likely to be one of the ele- of the maker’s soul. That is what this book seeks ments that allows the region to at least confirm to unravel. 2 introduction 001-034 15802 9/21/05 9:45 PM Page 3 THE NORTHERN RHÔNE IN HISTORY disciplinarian Emperor Probus halted Lyon’s monopoly on the sale of wine in Gaul in AD 280. In ancient times the northern Rhône vineyards By this time, the Roman grip on the region was of Côte-Rôtie and Hermitage were inextricably in decline, with invasions from the Rhine and linked with the fortunes of Lyon and Vienne. interventions between local tribes. The former, founded in 43 BC as Lugdunum, is The legacy of the Roman age stands tall in where the Rhône meets the Saône, two impor- the inspiring architecture of some of Vienne’s tant rivers forming a natural junction for the buildings and monuments. As a lover of fine transport of goods towards Paris, the Alps, or food, wine, and horse racing, I salute the Pyra- the Mediterranean. For the Romans, Lyon was mide each time I am in Vienne. This pale stone the hub of their road network in Transalpine obelisk stands as the reminder of the finish of Gaul, and a two-metre-wide road lined by walls furious chariot races gone by, just beyond the ran from Lyon to the Narbonne region, track- front door of Fernand Point’s establishment, ing along the Rhône’s right bank. Traces of still a restaurant today, that was itself a temple this road exist between Cornas and Guilherand for gastronomes in the 1950s and 1960s. today. The Temple of Augustus and Livia, similar Lyon and Vienne were rival cities in Roman in style to the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, and the times, with much of the local wealth and power amphitheatre, not excavated until 1930 and centred at first on Vienne. The latter, the locus holding up to 13,000 spectators, are other of the Allobroges people, became a full Roman reminders of this belle époque. Across the river colony under Caligula before AD 41 and was a at St-Romain-en-Gal has been excavated since flourishing base for Roman soldiers. In those the 1970s a Gallo-Roman site that is thought days, its local wine, the vinum picatum, gained to have been the working area of a town, with the attention of venerable Roman writers like villas, workshops, and thermal baths. The Pliny the Elder. Picatum means “pitch,” the recently established museum there has a thor- wine holding tarry flavours according to scribes ough display of artefacts of the time, including of the time. It was said to have been taken to mosaics. Rome and appreciated there; whether the appre- Further down the river, at a beguiling curl in ciation was purely for flavour is not certain, its course south, is the hill of Hermitage, its since wines were also critiqued for their poten- town of Tain known in Roman times as Tegna. tial medicinal powers in Roman times.