Second, the more general the name that a wine carries, the less good the wine. A Côtes-du-Rhône is a wine, almost any wine, from the Rhone Valley; Châteauneuf-du-Pape is a wine made from certain specific grapes in one of the best districts of the Rhône; Châteauneuf-du-Pape—Château Fortia is a wine from one of the few choice plots of that district. No Château Fortia is likely to be sold simply as Châteauneuf-du-Pape no Châteauneuf-du-Pape as Côtes-du-Rhône.
Third, although Rhône wines, especially the red and white Hermitages of exceptional years and outstanding vineyards, are long-lived, there is no reason to make a fetish of old age and to keep something for twenty years which is as well drunk after five. Tavel, like most vins rosés is better before its third birthday than it will ever be again; the white wines, after their third or fourth summer, tend to lose in freshness what they gain in bouquet; to the producers of Côte Rôtie and Châteauneuf-du-Pape a good 1937 is already an old bottle. The trend toward younger wines is general the world over in this impatient age, and there is nothing much we can do about it except lay away a particularly good Hermitage when we find one, in the hope that the world will be less impatient twenty years from now.
Côte Rôtie
At Vienne, some seventeen miles downstream from Lyon, the Rhône, which has been running southeast, swings in a wide are southwestward, and for the space of ten miles or so, the rocky hills along its western bank face almost due south. They look from a distance like worn brown stairways; narrow little terraces, each with its pitiful two or three rows of vines and its retaining wall, or murgey, climb from the river road five or six hundred feet to the rocky crests behind. These pocket-hand-kerchief vineyards can only be worked by hand, and their cultivation is no task for men interested in an easy living. It is not rare to see in the main street of Ampuis old vingerons bent almost double by forty or fifty years' work in the vines, and Côte Rôtie, so far as production is concerned, is the most expensive red wine of France.
There are about two hundred and fifty acres legally entitled to the name Côte Rôtie, but a good many of these have been abandoned or are half cultivated. The first-rate vineyards consist of about ninety acres, and their total production, even in a favorable year, is well under 15,000 cases. There are fifty-two officially listed quartiers, or vineyard areas, and these, as often as not, are divided among two or three or a half-doz-en owners, Vineyard names, therefore, are hardly ever used, and the only indication as to quarter that I have ever seen on a label is La Turque which is probably the most celebrated plot of the whole hillside.
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