A Mini-slew of Northern Rhône Wines

I haven't had a whole lot of northern Rhône wine. I've had some nice things at tastings, but at home with meals my experiences are mostly limited to the wines of Saint Joseph and Crozes Hermitage. Then, about a week and a half ago there was a stretch of a few days in which I had three top-notch wines from the northern Rhône. It was an interesting trio - I feel like I really learned something from these particular wines.

First, it was 1998 Paul Jaboulet Aîné Hermitage La Chapelle, at least $100 if you buy it now, imported by Frederick Wildman. Why this wine? I dropped by Deetrane's house one night and he made a very delicious western Chinese style beef noodle soup (pickled greens, pickled chilis, sesame oil, and so on). He disappeared into the cellar and returned bearing this treasure.

A few nights later my friend Adam came by, Deetrane too, as I had braised a pork shoulder with fennel and blood orange. I decided to open a bottle that I recently acquired, the 2000 Noël Verset Cornas, $60, Imported by Connoisseur Wines (usually imported by Kermit Lynch, but I bought this at Crush, who obtained it from a private collection). Noël Verset is thought by many to make the finest wines in Cornas, but he is over 90 years old now and he finally retired, and there is no one who will take over for him. So there will be no more Verset Cornas. Every time some one uncorks a bottle, that's one less bottle of Verset that will ever exist.

And then the very next evening, BrooklynLady and I had dinner with our friends Clarke and Sophie and one of the things they served was a hearty cassoulet-type stew with a 2000 Auguste Clape Cornas, about $50 but the wines cost more now, Imported by either Michael Skurnik or Kermit Lynch, perhaps by both?

Can you believe that, the weird way that things can string together sometimes?

The Jaboulet Hermitage was striking in its elegance. Deetrane decanted it and it looked as though a lot of the solid matter had fallen from the skeleton of the wine, leaving only garnet tinted water (and in fact there was a load of sediment at the bottom). Yet the wine was quite intense, with very ripe dark fruit and lovely floral and warm spicy aromatics. The horses, the skinned rabbits, the tar, the other things I think of when I think of northern Rhône Syrah - not there. This wine was all about elegance, nothing rustic whatsoever.

The 2000 Verset, however, now that wine had a rustic side. We didn't decant it, and at first the nose was all roasted soil and horse stable. The wine tasted great though, very ripe, but also layered and complex, and after about a half hour the nose blossomed, showing fruit and flowers, blood and meat, anchored by that same roasted barnyard sense. What impressed me most about this big and brawny wine though, aside from its sheer deliciousness, was that it showed great detail in its flavors - it sacrificed nothing in nuance. And in a hot year that made very ripe wines, Verset's Cornas is merely 12.5% alcohol.

The 2000 Clape is not a wine that I would call brawny, and it wasn't a rustic either. To me, it was more like the Hermitage than it was like the Verset. It built slowly over the course of an hour, showing deliciously ripe fruit, peppery and intense. We came back to it an hour after that and it had really blossomed, with expansive flavors of orange, leather, and earth. A big wine, but also a wine of clarity and poise. Clape also kept the alcohol low - a very respectable 13%.

How much can you really know from drinking three wines - very little. But I feel like I have a better understanding of the elegance of Hermitage relative to the rusticity of Cornas. And a sense of the disparate styles of Verset and Clape, both great producers, but whose wines have very different personalities, at least in the 2000 vintage.

By the way, you'll notice in the two photos that what I'm guessing is a lot number appears in the lower left of the label. It reads "L1" on the Verset, and "L4" on the Clape. Anyone know what that means, exactly?