Another pre-dawn awakening as we shuttled up a fog-bound Autoroute de Soleil to make our first appointment in Côte Rôtie at 10.00am. We found gregarious patron Joel Champet talking up the merits of the 2010 vintage as well as the prospects of ‘Les Bleues’ in this weekend’s Rugby World Cup Final: “they have nothing to lose”. Down the road in Ampuis, Patrick Jasmin was equally upbeat and an extensive barrel tasting of his 2010 vintage fully justified his bonhomie. We then enjoyed a terrific lunch at his local bistro ‘La Serine’ which boasts a cracking wine list, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is jointly owned by local winemaking luminaries Villard, Cuilleron, Gaillard and Villa. With a well-executed menu of regional cuisine this is a highly-recommended pit stop for those travelling in the area.

After a morning sampling young Syrah it was somewhat of a relief to head South to Condrieu where tastings at Château Grillet, Francois Merlin and Domaine Georges Vernay reinforced our view that 2010 is a stonking white wine vintage in the Northern Rhône.

Joel Champet

Cote Rotie Champet 2009

Tom and I are making a whistle-stop voyage down the Rhône valley this week to catch up with vigneron friends and get an insight into the Rhône 2009 vintage, of which we have heard great promise.  After driving south from Lyon in heavy rain on Sunday evening we started tasting bright and early on Monday in Côte Rôtie with our old chum Patrick Jasmin.  Tasting through the constituent parts of Patrick’s wine is always a pleasure, the 2009 shows huge potential with a wealth of violet and red berry aromas, a deep core of sweet black fruit, fine tannic structure and a bright acidity.  All the ingredients are here for a Grand Vin.  Patrick only makes one cuvée of Côte Rôtie and the 2009 should be a tub-thumper.

A tad further north on La Viallière climat of the Côte Brune, Joël and Romain Champet’s single vineyard 2009 Côte Rôtie is already finished and ready for bottling.  This is an Old School northern Rhône Syrah with no new oak and an attractive bouquet of blackberries and blackcurrants, a mid-weight palate of briary hedgerow fruit and supple tannins.  This is a classic, traditional Côte Rôtie and, on past form, should represent cracking value for money.

After a welcome lunchtime pit stop at the winemakers’ favourite haunt, Le Chaudron restaurant in Tournon (great food, fabulous wine list) we drove down to Livron-sur-Drôme to sample Jean-Marie Lombard’s Brézème.  Both of Jean Marie’s Syrahs were showing very well from cask.  The Grand Chêne is dense and dark with autumnal fruit aromas and tastes over pitchy tannins.  The Eugène de Monicault usually exhibits a little more finesse, but is still a trifle closed at present – there is clearly lots of fruit and structure here but it needs time to integrate.

Beetling northwards back towards Cornas we rounded off a fine day’s tasting with a mammoth degustation with three generations of the Clape family (Auguste aged 85, Pierre 60 and Olivier 31).  This is a dynasty given to modesty and the Clape’s seemed almost embarrassed at the exuberance of fruit in their 2009 wines. There are notes of the blockbuster 2003 vintage here but against a more restrained background, with a fresh acidity and greater phenolic ripeness.  In short, the Clape’s 2009 wines are sensational.

Tomorrow we look forward to visits at Messrs Chave and Graillot.  Day One impressions are that Rhône 2009 is living up to the hype, bring it on!

Tasting chez Clape

Jasmin over a barrel

If the assembled wine-tasters from Baltimore-based asset management company, T Rowe Price, would rather have been in the park on the finest summer evening this year, they weren’t letting on.  Instead, shoe-horned into an upstairs room in this traditional City boozer, they proved to be a model audience and even threw in some tricky questions – what dictates the size of the bubbles in sparkling wine and is there a correlation with quality?  No, was the answer to the latter when you are talking about bottle-fermented (although the cheapest method of sparkling production which involves pumping C02 through tanked wine will produce large bubbles which will rapidly dissipate).  The Champagne Companion (Michael Edwards, Firefly Book 1999) notes that ‘bubbles should be uniform in shape, lively, and flow in a persistent stream toward the surface of the wine; Experts differ about the ideal size of bubbles. Most Champenois say that the smaller the bubbles, the better the Champagne, but large bubbles are not necessarily the sign of an inferior wine – your palate is a better judge.‘  If any one out there can convincingly improve on this thesis, we’ll send them a bottle of Yapp Champagne!

Highlights of the Rhone wine tasting (it was sparkling Saint Péray that attracted the effervescent debate) were Domaine Georges Vernay’s rare, single-vineyard Condrieu Coteaux du Vernon 2007 (400 cases produced) which was tasted (perhaps unfairly) against the Ardèche co-operative’s generic Viognier (eminently drinkable, but not in the same league) and Patrick Jasmin’s Côte Rôtie 1999.  This was Patrick’s inaugural solo vintage (following the untimely death of his father, Robert the previous year) and it proved to be everything one might hope for in traditional (rather than single-vineyard, super charged) Côte Rôtie – rustic-nosed, medium-bodied, supple, smoky and silky.

We departed into the balmy night and the discreet group never let on whether they managed the assets of a certain Baltimore-based wine critic.