2008 Cornas Les Vieilles Vignes

Director/winemaker Alberic Mazoyer told me that "there's no reason that Cornas should be rustic unless the wine has been polluted by brettanomyces or dirty oak. It's richer than other wines of the Rhone, sure, because it's warmer here, but coarse tannins and strong animal character are just signs of inattentive winemaking. Cornas should be a marriage of power and freshness. Yes, Cornas is tannic, but the tannins can and should be fine and harmonious. People who expect Cornas to be sauvage are probably using flawed wines as their measuring stick, and that's just wrong." Mazoyer calls 2009 "a different animal than other hot years like 2003 and 2005. There was good rain in the winter and early spring, then it was sunny and dry through the season but not overly hot. There was also a lot of water in the ground from 2008 so there wasn't hydric stress on the vines as in '03 and '05. There also weren't any heat spikes, which means that the grapes matured steadily, which is also good. The wines are pretty rich but they're more supple than the '05s and '03s, with less firmness and dry character."

According to director and winemaker Alberic Mazoyer, 2008 is a lot like 2004. "The wines have very good fragrance and purity but aren't especially powerful. The harvest went very late and we finished picking on October 28 so there's good complexity to the wines. If you didn't get scared by the September rains and rush your harvest, you were rewarded by another month of nice weather and the vines had time to recover. But if you panicked," he went on, "you got green grapes and flavors that were not fully mature." He also pointed out that the further north you go in 2008 the more difficult the vintage was. "Cornas mostly missed the problems that hit Cote-Rotie, for example, and you'll find that the wines here don't have the greenness and sharp acidity that you get up north." He also told me that he thinks that classic Cornas "is an exercise in controlled rusticity; the wines shouldn't be too polished or they'll be anonymous syrah." (Cynthia Hurley Wine Imports, West Newton, MA) Also recommended: 2007 Saint-Joseph Les Vinsonnes (86).