Beat the Summer Heat with Cornas!

You know that I'm joking. If I were to list 25 wines that I want to drink in hot weather, I cannot imagine that Cornas would appear. Who wants to drink rustic and earthy northern Rhône Syrah when it's very humid and 94 degrees outside?

But the other night I had dinner with a good friend who is somewhat of a short rib master. I wanted to show off a new short rib recipe I've been working on, and so that's what we ate. Heat and humidity be damned.

I braised short ribs (Slope Farms, of course) with Chipotle peppers inflected liquid. Nothing complicated - here's the recipe:

Salt and pepper the short ribs a day or two before cooking. Brown them well over high heat on all sides in a heavy bottomed pot. Remove the ribs, pour out the fat from the pot, lower the heat to medium, and add some oil. When it is hot, add chopped onions and a clove of lightly crushed garlic and stir, scraping up the brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Add salt here, and then a 28 oz. can of tomatoes - I like to use whole plum tomatoes and crush them with my hands. Add some chicken stock, about 2 cups let's say, stir well, and then add two chopped Chipotle peppers.

I used La Morena brand peppers in adobo sauce. The peppers aren't very big, so you might be thinking "Wow, only two peppers for all of those ribs and sauce?" I want the smokey spicy Chipotle aromas and flavors to be present, not to dominate, and you're going to braise this for a long time. I put a tight lid on the pot it in a 225 degree oven at about 9 at night and don't take it out until the kids wake up at 6 AM.

This dish is good no matter what, but there aren't many ingredients. If you use really good tomatoes and home made stock, it makes a big difference.

After the braising is done I remove the ribs and pour the fat off the top of the cooking liquid and purée it. Now comes the creative part. You can shred the meat and serve it with the sauce over pasta or use it as part of a taco.

But these are short ribs, after all, so I do the shredding with the leftovers. I like to serve them as is, over the sauce, which I like to reheat with a little bit of cream to make it feel more luxurious, topped with a scattering of cilantro and scallions. If you eat a small portion, it works even in the heat of summer.

But what to drink with this dish? Probably beer, but I'm stubborn and we wanted wine. I remembered my friend Peter telling me a little while ago that Syrah is very flexible and can work with dishes like this. So Adam dug around in his cellar and produced a fantastic bottle of wine, the 1997 Auguste Clape Cornas.

This is totally unlike the 2000 I had not too long ago, which was delicious and compelling, but much more rustic. The 1997 Clape is without question the most elegant Cornas that I've had. Intense with black olives and earth, but focused and narrow on the nose. And perfectly balanced on the palate, great intensity of flavor, but nothing juts out, not remotely clunky. Very elegant, pretty wine. It worked very well with the smokey spicy meat, assertive enough to hold its own, but graceful too. A completely lovely and delicious Cornas. And somehow it felt like good summer eating and drinking.

Understanding Cornas, via St. Joseph

Recently I attended a small dinner organized by Michael Wheeler and Joe Salamone and Stephen Bitterolf of Crush. This dinner happened because those guys were able to find certain northern Rhône wines that are beloved to them, and they decided that they wanted to drink them together.

What are the northern Rhône wines that drive these guys to drink? Hermitage? Nope. Côte Rôtie? Nope. Well not on this night, anyway. It was Cornas, mostly, and one particular St. Joseph. We convened at Apiary, where Monday night's no corkage policy and the generally excellent food turn the dining room into a who's who in the NYC wine trade.

After drinking six top Cornas wines, after thinking and talking about them, I was very happy. But it was when the next wines hit the table that I had a little Cornas breakthrough. And the wines that hit the table were from St. Joseph. I'll explain that in a minute. Here are the wines we drank, first:

2006 Auguste Clape Cornas.
2001 Auguste Clape Renaissance.

2001 Thierry Allemand Cornas Chaillot.
2001 Thierry Allemand Cornas Reynard.

2000 Noël Verset Cornas.
1993 Noël Verset Cornas (magnum).

1992 Raymond Trollat St. Joseph (2 different bottles).
1985 Raymond Trollat St. Joseph.

These wines provoked lively discussion and the views that will appear here are solely those of the author and do not represent the views held by the network or any of its corporate sponsors. And I should mention that Verset and even more so Trollat's wines are impossible to find, and this was an incredibly generous thing to do, to share these rare wines.

The first thing I learned is that the 2006 Clape Cornas is not a wine that appeals to me, and I found little that identified it as Cornas. To me it felt more like a highly polished and very modern Syrah, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with that, and while in that context it was perfectly good wine, it isn't something that I would buy for myself. The 2001 Renaissance, though, was an interesting wine. It was well balanced and expressive, and there was an pleasing animale character underneath the black olives and dark fruit.

I had never before sat with Thierry Allemand's Chaillot and Reynard, and I relished the opportunity. It's funny - in drinking and comparing these 2001's, the Reynard was probably the better wine, but I took more pleasure in Chaillot. Reynard showed as a more complete wine. There was a pronounced menthol character on the nose that colored the fruit and soil, the wine had grit and substance, it was well extracted and also well balanced. The alcohol in the Chaillot stuck out a little and it felt a little herky-jerky at times, but there were things about this wine that excited me more than anything about Reynard excited me. I liked its comparatively elegant expression and sheer texture, the energetic brightness of the fruit, the almost delicate finish.

It's always a treat to drink the wines of Noël Verset. The 2000 was very good, although I must say that I have had better bottles of it. The magnum of 1993, however, was great. Balance, grace, depth, character - this wine seemed to have everything. Verset's wines do something for me that I've not found in any other wine. There are two distinct layers, if that's the right word. There is a top layer of fruit, perhaps some floral tones, and this is the pretty layer. Even with 17 years of age, when the fruit is not as fruity anymore, there is a prettiness to this aspect of the wine. Under that is a baked soil, earthy, far more rustic layer, and it doesn't act to compliment the top layer. It is almost at complete odds with the top layer, and this conflict is engrossing and weird, and somehow harmonious and lovely.

And then came Raymond Trollat's wines from St. Joseph, and all of the sudden I understood what Cornas is supposed to be. The Trollat wines were so very different from the Cornas wines that preceded them. They had none of the rustic edge, they came off as seamless, without edges. The 1992 was my favorite, with its beautiful floral aromatics and its gentle elegance.

It might sound like a very simple and basic thing, but for me it was a profound moment, drinking the Trollat wines after all that Cornas. I'm not saying that I think Cornas is better than St. Joseph or vice-versa. It was just one of those moments in which something that you hear as wine common knowledge is illuminated in a personal way. I've heard and read that Cornas is rustic. There is something rustic about Cornas wines, and when they're well made, it doesn't detract at all from the experience of drinking the wines. And maybe trying to compare a Cornas to St. Joseph is kind of silly - they are apples and oranges. But I had to drink great examples of each wine, together, at the same dinner, in order to understand this.

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?