Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [71]
The Rest of Burgundy
Burgundy’s entries in the value category are not the wine world’s cheapest, but if you go with a good producer, they do reward the slight price premium with character. Here, we will taste two Mâconnais whites—the basic Mâcon-Villages level and the famous Pouilly-Fuissé, as well as a Pinot Noir from the Côte Chalonnaise. The Côte Chalonnaise Pinot Noir will show you a more rustic cousin to the classic red Burgundy names.
The whites are both made without oak, so the comparison is strictly appellation status—a basic versus a more prestigious appellation. Will the quality difference justify the price difference? That’s something the buyer must decide.
The Rhône Valley
I started this chapter with Champagne, my favorite French wine. I’m ending it with my other favorite French wine region—the Rhône Valley. (With all the wines you’ve tasted by now, you know that choosing a single favorite is impossible.) Rhône wines are full of intensity, generosity, and character; many say this is due to the unique and unusual growing conditions—the vines alternately bake in the Mediterranean sun and cower against the knifelike wind called the Mistral that whips through the valley.
Like so many classic wine regions, the Rhône is named for the river that runs through it. Its soil is a crazy quilt of wildly different blocks and patches that were upended, folded, and tossed about when the Alps emerged, then were eroded, layered, and repositioned by the river’s flow, which was once quite powerful.
The easiest way to understand the Rhône is in halves, as shown on the map—the Northern Rhône and the Southern Rhône—because they differ in a key way. The Northern Rhône’s paradigm wines are based on just two grapes—the red Syrah and the white Viognier (both of which you tasted in the last chapter). Like Burgundy, they are regionally labeled in the French tradition, but they could just as well be varietals. By contrast, the Southern Rhône’s famous wines in all three colors (red, rosé, and white, all regionally named) are traditionally blends of many different local grapes.
The Northern Rhône
REDS The red wines from the Northern Rhône—all based on the mighty Syrah grape—are full-bodied, intense, and tannic. They are the paradigm wines for New World varietal wines Syrah and Shiraz (the spelling used most often in Australia). You may want to repeat the comparative tasting of these from the last chapter. All of them are oak aged for some period of time—usually in large, old oak casks, although small oak barrels like those used in Bordeaux and Burgundy are increasingly employed. This adds to the full, powerful style of the wines. There is not an official “cru” ranking as in Burgundy (although there are crus whose superior status is acknowledged in the trade), but the top appellations, which I have listed first, come from the best vineyard areas, and yields are kept lower by law. The top appellations usually have the most oak character.
Hermitage (air-mee-TAHJH) and Côte-Rôtie (coat row-TEE) The top of the line. These are powerful, brawny wines with lots of plummy, raisiny fruit flavor and a peppery, spicy, smoky aroma. These wines have the alcohol, tannin, and fruit concentration to age and improve for many years, so if you see older ones on a restaurant wine list and feel like splurging, they are a great bet. You will be impressed with the exotic character they develop after bottle age–leather, chocolate, spice,