Yesterday The Editor and I hosted our lovely friends Alex and Guy for lunch. We had a great time! We had several extremely fine wines, but I am only going to write about one of them (sorry Guy and Alex, your offerings were lovely and extremely kind!) and follow it with a screed that has been brewing in my mind of late.
Cornas ‘Henri’ 2022 from Dumien-Serrette is the (extremely) old vines cuvée of Dumien-Serrette’s Patou lieu-dit Cornas. I am told all of the vines are above 70 years old and some are older than 115 years. However, it is very much a wine of ‘Patou’, and that is what I want to talk about.
Let us do the note first!
Cornas ‘Henri’ 2022, Dumien-Serrette
This was so very, very beautiful.
Wonderful poise and precision, with perfect acidity levels and a fantastically rigorous but incredibly fine tannic structure.
Huge depth of flavour from the old vines, but so elegant and light on its feet, it wore its undoubted brilliance with style and panache.
Totally transparent communication of terroir. For the lover of really fine Cornas, words are not enough to do justice to that… Entity.
Clearly infanticide to drink that bottle, but then I might not be here in six years!
My first smell and taste really was one of those, “My god, it is full of stars” moments. Similarly… Ah I will admit it! As I drained my final glass and felt that wine expanding and redefining the boundaries of uninhibited aesthetic delight, specks of emotion appeared at the corners of my eyes.
By arse I am pleased I have six more bottles in storage!
Now, I have had a lot of great wines recently, including several yesterday, but three stand out in my mind. They are all 2022 Syrahs from the Northern Rhône, namely: Côte-Rôtie Côteaux de Tupin from Duclaux, Côte-Rôtie Coeur de Combard from Julien Barge and the above. These wines, for me, are about as good as the wine experience gets.
Recently, I have also had Dom Perignon P2 2004, a much more expensive wine than my three. This is a hilariously fine wine, but it is different to the three above. The P2 is almost completely a wine of the winemaker’s art. This is a completely valid form of aesthetic creation.
The three wines I mention moved me, transported me, took me to specific places at specific times – they were liquid photographs of those vineyards in that vintage. This is very much my aesthetic ideal.
Objectively, of course, there is nothing inherently superior of the liquid photograph-aesthetic ideal over the winemaker’s art-aesthetic ideal. Both are fine.
The point of enjoying wine, ideally with friends over a meal as I did with all three of these, is that you find your own aesthetic ideal and run after it hell-for-leather! These three wines are precisely why I buy and drink fine wine.
When you start enjoying wine, it is fine to use journalists and critics to help you find your way, but you want to find your way. When you have tasted enough to decide what you like, jump off the springboard of those journalists, leave them behind, and pursue what you love.
If you forever slavishly follow someone else’s aesthetic ideal, you are not pleasuring yourself. You are not living your own life. Find what you like, be your own master, and you will be fully satisfied.
Buy Cornas ‘Henri’ 2022 from Dumien-Serrette at Gauntleys of Nottingham.
