I have loved Cornas all my adult life, and Cornas Patou 2005 from Dumien-Serrette extravagantly shows the magic this 114 Hectare appellation is capable of producing.
The entire Cornas appellation is the area of a medium-sized Bordeaux estate, there is so little wine to fuel the world’s demand for this nectar! Whilst it is normally a robust wine, the individual lieux-dits produce wines of sometimes strikingly different characteristics.
The production methods can also have an enormous effect on the character of a wine. Different degrees of extraction, ripeness of harvested grapes, or even, horror of horrors, use on new oak for ageing the wine. There is certainly a wealth of diversity from this small appellation.
Of course, some of it is pure crap. Courbis is a prime example of someone who should have their vineyards confiscated. When I tasted Courbis’ 2005 Cornas La Sabrotte I was disappointed by both the typicity (“There’s so little Cornas here you’d need a medium to interpret it and all it will age to is acrid, dry oak juice” and the overall quality (”And let’s bang the final nails in this wreck of a coffin by saying the enthusiasm of a 14 year old boy, who discovered his father’s stash of rhythm mags and his mother’s turkey baster at the same time, wouldn’t be enough to move beyond describing this as pretty short and dimensionless”).
Verset and Clape are almost always excellent. Noel ‘Papa’ Verset has retired (from life) so his wines are now highly sought after and very expensive; Clape is pricy too. Yet in 2008 it was not difficult to try nine year old examples of both during one evening. I used to buy a couple of six packs of Clape every year when I was an academic. I own no Verset and a measly three bottles of Clape today.
It goes without saying that the variety of Cornas styles make it a very flexible drink – if you are eating meat ideally. One night in 2009 four of us had five bottles of Cornas with our dinner. I remember all five and the hilarious larks we had drinking two 2003s (and therefore getting tired and emotional as newts).
A group of new producers, Gilles, Bourg and Domaine Lionnet, have established themselves in recent years producing really fine wines and charging very reasonable prices for them. Their wines are traditionally made, but made with real love for the terroir, fruit and wine; they are vrai Cornas but are clean and totally free of Brett. Lionnet can be obtained for well under forty coins a bottle retail and the chap is so skilled even his 2018, a tough vintage, was delicious.
Cornas Patou 2005, Dumien-Serrette
Beauty in liquid form.
You want more? Oh… If you insist…
Patou is clearly a magical lieu-dit, especially when its fruit is borne into wine form by father and son team Dumien-Serrette. They make beguiling wine that ages forever and transforms into entities of pure beauty such as this wonder.
It is softly, delicately scented with gentle flowers, fruit and earth. It is understated but so bewitching it drags your nose to the glass time after time. Can Syrah really be so refined? So gentle? So inexpressibly lovely? Apparently, it can!
There is such refinement, such finesse on the palate. It caresses and embraces your mouth, kisses your uvula, with soft flavours all charged with exquisite balance and supple charm. The length in the mouth is extraordinary.
Yet it is not just a ‘pretty pleaser’. It is extremely complex and intellectually engaging. Hell’s bells, it is stunning in the level of sagacious thrills it provides.
I simply cannot do this wine justice. Buy a good vintage, age it, drink it with friends over a meal, love it forever.
