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.
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