Like the wines of many another district, the Rhânes have had their periods of favor and glory, their declines and re-suscitations. Câte Râtie was a vineyard before the Romans came to Gaul, and was celebrated by Plutarch and Pliny and Martial and Columella. Hermitage, too in all probability, was a vineyard under Rome, although there are those who say that its grape, the Syrah (having originated in Shiraz, whence the name), was brought back from Asia Minor by a returning Crusader. Châteauneuf-du-Pape was already famous in the days of the Great Schism, when the Papal Court was installed in Avignon, and Provence was the center of culture in the West.
The Rhône wines were popular, too in nineteenth-century England. Mr. Saintsbury speaks of Château Grillet as “favorite here in the days of Regency”; today it is almost unknown, even in France. Saintsbury mentions, too, an Hermitage 1846,“the manliest French wine I ever drank,” though he drank it when it was forty years old; there are perhaps some of our modern Hermitages, but not many, which will last as long.
The most recent eclipse which Rhône wines have suffered was brought about by two factors: first, inadequate laws and controls, which permitted all sorts of inferior wines to be sold fraudulently under the famous old names (Châteauneuf-du-Pape, during the early 1920's, was almost in the class of “grocer's claret”) and thus brought down the price; second, the understandable reluctance of peasant growers to cultivate their steep and terraced vineyards by hand when, with wine prices down, they could hope for no more than a miserable living in return for the most back-breaking kind of work.
Thanks largely to the efforts of one man, Baron Le Roy de Boiseaumarié, President of the Wine Growers' Association of the Rhône, the necessary legislatoin has been passed. Rhone wines are now produced under the most stringent controls, and they are well on their way back to the high place which they deserve and once occupied in the hirearchy of the Grands Vins de France. They are still not so expensive, comparatively, as they will be, and an American wine buyer will probably get better value in red Rhônes than in any other wines shipped out of France since the war. There are a few points worth remembering:
First, vintage years are less important in the Rhône Valley than in any other district of France; the faithful sun of Châteauneuf-du-Pape is not the pale sun of Chablis, and the Rhône growers, like those of California, can say with some trace of justification that “every year is a vintage year.” To be sure, there are variations, large crops and small, but a really bad season comes four or five times a century, not four or five times a decade, as on the Côte d'Or.
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