Wines of the Rhône

The River Rhône leaves Lake Geneva like a child getting out of school. It runs precipitously west out of the foothills of the Alps toward Lyon, forgetting the tranquillity and calm of Montreux and Lausanne and d on rosemary and thyme, and wile rabbit which had fed on God knows what, as daily hors d'oeuvres. At Condrieu you ate freshly caught perch, as sweet as the almonds with which they were cooked; at Orange and Avignon you could get truffled brandade de morue and aïole Mediterranean dishes, full of oil and garlic and Provençal sunshine. Chez Pic, in Valence, you were served those wonderful little goat's-milk cheese of St. Marcellin, which look like old, corroded silver watches when you buy them, but are snowy white when skinned, and go perfectly with the end of a bottle of red Hermitage at dinner.

But the greatest restaurant of the Rhône, and incomparably the best of France, is and has been for a decade the Restaurant de la Pyramide in Vienne, otherwise known after its fabulous proprietor and chef as “Point.” I have heard Point called “le roi” even by the director of the Tour d'Argent in Paris, which is praise indeed, and I doubt whether there is any chef or restaurant owner in western Europe who would have the pretension to call himself Point's equal today. During the war he was twice closed by the Germans, But within a week after the liberation of Vienne by the Seventh Army, his lovely bubble-thin baccarat glasses were back on his linen tablecloths, and his food was as good as any I have ever eaten.

Fernand Point is six feet three inches tall and weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. He has worked and lived in the kitchen since before he was ten; he has a prodigious memory, a great deal of imagination, an absolutely unfailing taste; when he is in a good mood, which is most of the time, he is as shy and simple and sensitive as a child. Like most great chefs he is capable of towering rages and black despair, and when you have seen him thus, it is easy to believe the story of Condé's chef, Vatel, who committed suicide when the fish for the King's dinner failed to arrive on time.

The dining room and cellar of the Restaurant de la Pyramide is the best possible starting point for any visit to the Rhône vineyards. The wines are all there, chosen with loving care by “le gros Fernand” himself—white Condrieu, pale and fragrant; rare Château Griller, golden, heady, with a trace of muscat in its bouquet; sparkling St. Péray; white Hermitage, honey-colored, long-lived; the sturdy, authoritative white wine of Châteauneuf-du-Pape; pink Tavel, the most famous vin rosé of France. And then, grande bouteille after grande bouteille, the orderly regiment of the reds— Côte Rôtie, Crozes, Hermitage, Cornas, Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

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.

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.

Traditionally, however, the two best slopes of the “Roasted Hillside A” are known as the Côte Brune and the Côte Blonde. They are separated by nothing more than a deep ravine, but the soil of the former is visibly darker in color, and its wines are said to be, on the whole, a little fuller than those of the Côte Blonde. Names such as Côte Brune and Côte Blonde, in France, could scarcely fail to produce a whole crop of picaresque stories, and it is well established in legend, if not in fact, that a noble lord of Ampuis, named Maugiron, once bequeathed the Côte Blonde to his blonde daughter and the Côte Brune to her dark-haired sister. To judge form the way the vineyards are partitioned today, both daughters must have had a lot of children.

The grape of Côte Rôtie, like that of the Hermitage, is the syrah, though certainly not the syrah or Sirah of California. As is the case with practically all of the great red Burgundies, the best Côte Rôties have 10 per cent or better of white grapes interplanted, but the white grape here is the Vionnier (or Viognier) rather than the Chardonnay.

A genuine Côte Rôtie is said to have the fragrance of violets and raspberries. This is going pretty far, but a good vintage of La Turque or its neighbors is something that a wine lover rarely finds —a great “sleeper” in the average list of French wines, a rustic Lafite, an unsung Chambertin.

Condrieu

Condrieu is the Vouvray of the Rhône. Almost everything that is said of Vouvray, and is false, can be said of Condrieu, and is true. Reputed not to travel,Vouvray crosses the ocean without a qualm; described as short-lived, it has been known to outlast any other white wine of France, except possibly Hermitage. Condrieu, on the other hand, definitely will not travel, is best when about two years old, and is a delightful, capricious little wine, one bottle of which may turn out still and a bit sweet, and the next dry but pétillant or slightly sparkling. These qualities and faults are not, as our ancestors imagined, due to some mysterious, inherent, perverse element in the wine itself—they are the result of a lack of scientific methods of wine-making. A boy who expects to spend his life in a humble village does not require a diplomat's education, though he may turn out to be the better and more honest man of the two, and a wine destined to be drunk within twenty miles of its vineyard, as is most Condrieu and as was most Vouvray sixty years ago, can become an honorable and even distinguished bottle without ever receiving the cellar treatment which a wine must have if it is to go abroad and acquit itself honorably among strangers. To drink good Condrieu, you will do well to go to Lyon, better still, to Vienne, or best of all, to Condrieu itself.

The vineyards are a little south of Côte Rôtie, on the west bank of the Rhône. The vine is the Vionnier. The wine, fuller than Vouvray, with more alcohol and body, has a strange, wild, flowery bouquet and a flavor like no other wine I have ever tasted, except, for the best of reasons, Château Grillet.

Château Grillet

This is a Condrieu (and the best of Condrieus) in all save name. It is made from the same grape, the Vionnier, grown on steep-terraced hillsides in the heart of the Condrieu district. Unlike the other Rhone vineyards, however, Chateau Grillet is a single property; the owner, Monsieur Gachet, makes his wine with great care—it would stand a trip to Alaska or darkest Africa—and though it sometimes throws sediment in bottle, as any respectable Rhone wine should, it ranks definitely as a a vin de garde, one you can keep. Hard to find, but eminently worth drinking when you can find it, Chateau Grillet is one of the rarest wines of France—a big, dry, brassy, golden wine, with a flavor which is like a resounding, amplified echo of Condrieu itself.

Hermitage

Twenty-odd miles downstream from Cote Rotie, if you are traveling south-ward on R.N. 7, the valley narrows rather abruptly, and a precipitous, rocky hillside, rising almost sheer from the river's edge, seems to bar all further progress toward the south. The broad, swift Rhone narrows, curves west, and the road and railway line crawl precariously around the hill's steep shoulder. Then suddenly road and river and railway swing east again; you are in the streets of a village, with a great sundrenched slope of vines on your left and miles of fertile farmland at your feet.

The hill of Hermitage is one of the most impressive vineyards of France. From the village of Tain at its foot, the vines of the lower slope sweep up to the walled terrace above like the glacis of some enormous fortress, with rampart after high rampart defending its summit. Two thousand yards long, five hundred yards wide, seven hundred feet above river and town at its highest point, Hermitage consists of some 250 man-made acres, chiseled for over a thousand years out of thin soul and rock.

On the crest of the hill, dominating the Rhone, there is a little white chapel. According to tradition it was here, in the days of the good Saint Louis, King of France, that a returning Crusader, weary of the world, built himself a hermitage and planted the first vines. His name, which we can afford to remember with gratitude, was Gaspard de Sterimberg, and whether or not he brought the Syrah grape with him, as is said, it is at least probable that his hermitage gave the vineyard and the wine their name.

Like Cote Rotie, the Hermitage vine-yard is divided into quartiers and although these appear but rarely on wine labels, they are certainly worth listing:

Varogne

Far more often than the name of a quartier, you will find on a good bottle of Hermitage a supplementary, private appellation belonging to one shipper. Thus Jaboulet Aine markets an Hermitage La Chapelle, though his La Chapelle vineyard is part of the quartier of L'Hermite, and Messrs. Chapoutier put out an Hermitage-Chante-Alouette, though their property of Chante-Alouette is in the quartier of Le Meal. This is no reflection on the quality of either wine, for each is excellent.

The red grape of Hermitage is our friend, the Syrah, but white Hermitage is the product of two grapes, the Roussanne and Marsanne, in most cases grown and harvested together. This combination, depending on methods of picking and vinification, produces two altogether distinctive but totally different wines, one Known as Hermitage Blanc and the other as Vin de Paille. The latter, which we rarely see in this country, is a luscious, heavy, golden wine, sweet as a Chateau Yquem; it is made from grapes that are picked when ripe and them laid on straw mats (whence the name paille or straw) for two months or better before pressing.

The conventional white Hermitage, on the other hand, is dry, extraordinarily full-bodied, high in alcohol, and possesses at its best a power and depth of flavor which are almost overwhelming. It is no wine to drink with lunch in summer, or with mountain trout, or with filet of sole; give it the Provencal dishes that it goes with, and there is hardly a better white wine in France.

Red Hermitage nevertheless deserves, I think, a higher place than its white sister. It doubtless used to be better than it is today, before the trade began insisting on wines that could be carried home and drunk the same evening; for all Rhone wines throw a heavy sediment, and almost all of them are now decanted and rebottled before shipment—a grave injustice to a fine vintage and a sure way to shorten its life.

One of the glories of an old Hermitage is its color, which at least one German writer has called “berrlich dunkles Rot,” and which Mr. Saintsbury, with considerably more grace, has described as brown but “flooded with such a sanguine as altogether transfigured it.” Like many of the wines of warmer countries (Italian Barolo, the Riojas of Spain, and most of our native Cabernets and Pinot Noirs), Hermitage has less bouquet than the Cote d'Or Burgundies and the Medoc clarets, and this is perhaps its only weakness, for in texture it is the purest satin and in flavor a very great wine indeed.

Crozes-Hermitage

Back of the main Hermitage hill, in the broken country east of the Rhone, there are a good many small vineyards which produce what is, in the words of a jury of wine-tasters a hundred years ago, “if not a brother, at least a first cousin of Hermitage itself.” Generally such wines, made from the Syrah or from the Roussanne and Marsanne grapes, used to be sold as “Crozes” by more scrupulous wine merchants, but as “Hermitage” by the others. A new legal appellation has been created, however—since 1938 they all go to market honorably as Crozes-Hermitage, and they are official first cousins now in name, as well as in quality and character and flavor.

St. Péray

This pleasant little village, on the right, or west, bank of the Rhone opposite Valence, has been described by the president of its local Syneicat as the “Rheims of the Ardeche”—Rheims, to be brutally explicit, meaning a town where sparkling wine is made, and the Ardeche being the name of an otherwise undistinguished departement I hardly think that this proud title is likely to prove very impressive outside the Rhone Valley, and the wine, as a matter of fact, is not impressive either, being heavy and without much in the way of delicacy or bouquet or charm. The still white wines of St. Peray are much better, being comparable to the white Hermitage and better than many white Crozes.

Cornas

Just north of St. Peray, Cornas is to red Hermitage what St. Peray is to white, a wine made from the same grape, on hillside with comparable exposure, but when all is said and done, a rather ordinary copy of the genuine article, a good red wine if inexpensive, a poor buy if high-priced.

After St. Peray and Cornas there is a sixty-mile gap before you find yourself in a district of great wines. This is not at all to say that the intervening miles are not wine country, for as the Rhone Valley widens, upland plains as well as hillsides are planted with vines, and most of the sound Cotes-du-Rhone come from obscure little communes south of Valence.

Châteauneuf-du-Pape

Wines with ecclesiastical names have always enjoyed a sort of special popularity, and they are legion—Liebfraumilch and Lacrima Christi, Graacher Moench and Erdener Praelat, Santa Maddalena, Chilean Santa Rita, and San Jose, plus heaven knows how many others, the Vignes du Seigneur and the Clos du Pape, the Blue Nun of Rhenish Hesse and the White Friars of Carthage, the Old Monk and the Blood of Judas (Sangue de Giuda), Chateau Pape-Clement and the Christian Brothers. Some of these have a wholly legitimate connection with the church, and others none at all. Some are complete phonies, and others (such as Erdener Praelat) are altogether outstanding.

A good deal of sound Chateauneuf-du-Pape has doubtless been made by anticlericals, and a good many bottles, drunk by atheists, but Chateauneuf's right to the papal name and to the crossed keys of St. Peter which appear on the village coat of arms can hardly be disputed. The old ruined castle above the town dates back to the days of papal tenure, when the modern departement of Vaucluse was an enclave of the church, and when Avignon was the Vatican City of Europe. From the windows of La Mere Germaine, where in happier days you lunched pretty much a la bonne franquette on the best Provencal cooking of France, you can see the walls of Avignon and the high outline of the old Papal Palace.

Chateauneuf-du-Pape, although it lies between R.N. 7 and the Rhone, is not so much a Rhone wine as a wine, THE wine, of Provence, of a country of fig trees and olive trees, its vineyards noisy with cicadas in summer and shimmering under the white Mediterranean sun, noisy with nightingales on August evenings, brown and dusty and desolate in winter, green as emerald in the early spring. The wine is fiery, big-bodied, purple-red when young, red-brown as it grows older, high in alcohol, a warm, heady, and impetuous wine of the southland.

The Chateauneuf-du-Pape vineyards are not on a hillside, but on a high, rolling, incredibly rocky plain, so covered with pebbles and small boulders that it seems unbelievable that anything, let alone a vine, can grow there and bear fruit. The strictly delimited zone of production is about four miles by six, though much of its area is not planted to vines, and the production per acre, as might be expected, is low, the legal maximum being less than 2 ½ tons of grapes, or about 350 gallons, per acre.

Unlike almost all other great French wines, Chateauneuf-du-Pape is not made from a single grape variety or from two, but from thirteen, generally grown and picked together, and each one, according to tradition, contributing its special excellence to the finished product. Some of these are white and some red; they include the Syrah of Hermitage and Cote Rotie, the Roussanne of white Hermitage, the Grenache, of which we shall have more to say later, the Clairette, which is white, the Mourvedre, Picpoul, Terret Noir, Counoise, Muscardin, Vaccarese, Picardan, Cinsaut, and Bourboulenc.

A little white wine, very full-bodied but good, is made from the white varieties alone, principally from the Roussanne.

Like the other Rhone vineyards, Chateauneuf-du-Pape is divided into quartiers, but there are 132 of these, and most of them we can afford to leave in the obscurity they deserve. The best is supposed to be Cabrieres, but this is not a name you are likely to see on a wine label. What you may see, and will if you look for it, is the name of one of the five chateaux of the Chateauneuf-du-Pape district which practice chateau-bottling, or the name of one of the major properties. I am listing the most im portant of these, together with the quartier in which each one lies:

Chateau Fortia—La Fortiasse

Chateau des Fines Roches—La Grenade

Chateau de la Nerthe—La Nerthe

Chateau de Vaudieu—Vaudieu

Chateau Rayas—Le Rayas and Pignan

Cabrieres-les-Silex—Cabrieres

Mont-Redon—Mont Redon

Tacussel—Bois Senescau

St. Andre—Les Pielons

Farguerol—Farguerol

Tavel

Southernmost of the Cotes-du-Rhone vineyards, Tavel belongs to R.N. 7 by courtesy rather than by geography. The village is ten miles or so west of Avignon, on the “wrong” bank of the Rhone, and with nothing, not even a decent inn, to recommend it to the tourist. But countless bottles of Taval, at the Hotel de I'Europe and Chez Hiely, at the Dominion and the Crillon and Chez Lance, in Avignon, have speeded travelers along R. N. 7 on their way, toward Aix and Brignoles and the Riviera. Pink Tavel, served chilled with a friture of crisp fresh little fish, or with a brandade de morue, under the first warm sun of a January hegira, is a memorable experience, and as much a part of R.N. 7 as the plane trees which line the road for mile after pleasant mile.

All of us have tasted wines which seemed memorable and peerless under certain circumstances and conditions. There used to be one made by a family named Caruso in Ravello, near Amalfi; at least a dozen people who had drunk it on the terrace of the Hotel Caruso, which commands one of the great views of the world, have assured me that it is better than Chambertin and Chateau Margaux. It is a sound little wine and travels, but in New York, without the view, it has lost its glory.

Tavel is an exception, for it tastes as good in Chicago or San Francisco as in Avignon, and wherever you find it, it is, if genuine and not too old, about the best vin rose in the world. The Tavel district is, to my knowledge, the only important vineyard district which makes nothing but rose, where the whole knowledge and skill and effort of a town go into the making of a wine which is pink, not red or white.

The officially delimited area is a little triangle about two miles by five; the basic grape (which also yields the best rose of California) is the Grenache, but small percentages of Cinsaut, Clairette, Picpoul, Colitor, Bourboulenc, and Carignan are permitted.

Like all roses worthy of the name, Tavel owes its color, which is not far from that of a ripe strawberry, to a special method of vinification. It is emphatically not a blend of white wine and red (no pink wine so made has ever) been worth drinking), and if I may be technical for a moment, I can explain quite simply how it is made.

With a few exceptions, the juice and pulp of all grapes are white, and the color of red grapes is quite literally skin-deep; all of the good red wines owe their color to this pigment in the skin, which is soluble in alcohol but not in grape juice. It is altogether possible, therefore, to make white wine from red grapes, if they are pressed as soon as they are picked, or before fermentation has set in; all red wines are made from grapes pressed immediately after picking; all red wines are made from red grapes crushed and fermented in their skins. As alcohol is produced during fermentation, the new wine takes on color from the skins, and left to its own devices, becomes red wine. If however, you take the new wine off the skins when it is the color of strawberries, it will be the color of strawberries all its life. If it is made from the proper grapes in one barren little Provencal valley, it will be Tavel.

The virtues and charms of Tavel are many; it can be drunk young (preferably before it is three years old), it should be served chilled (no inconsiderable advantage in Provence), it goes with any dish, from fried bouillabaisse to escargots and from fried fish to steak; it is a pretty wine (a half-dozen glasses of Tavel against a linen tablecloth look like so many flowers); it is an unpretentious wine (you can take it with you on a picnic and cool it in a brook).

The most important building of Tavel is the Cave Cooperative, a superb modern winery to which an increasing number of the small producers now bring their grapes, but there are three chateaux and a religious establishment supported principally by the wines they bottle. Like other Rhone districts, Tavel is divided into quartiers. Here are the more important producers, including the chateaux, and their quartiers:

Vaucroze—La Vaussiere

Chateau d'Aqueria—Manissy

Chateau de Trinquevedel—Romagnac

Chateau de Montezargues—Campey

Carcenies—Les Oliviers

Les Patus—Vallongue

Cabanette—Roc Crispin