Preserving the Language of CôRô By ERIC ASIMOV TO most wine drinkers today, the name Marius Gentaz means nothing. But to a devoted cadre of CôRô lovers, no name is more revered. The wines of Gentaz-Dervieux epitomize the fragile balance among gorgeous, subtle aromas; an earthy, almost animal-like complexity; and elegant, delicate textures that once distinguished this northernmost appellation in the northern RhôValley. Yet the precious supply of these wines is almost gone. After the 1993 vintage, Mr. Gentaz retired, and he died last year. Collectors hoard a dwindling number of bottles, to be shared on special occasions with a charmed few. Such is the sad prospect for small family estates without heirs to step in at retirement or death. Throughout the world of wine, legendary names associated with beautiful wines . like NoëVerset of Cornas, Raymond Trollat of St.-Joseph, Giovannini Moresco of Barbaresco and Henri Jayer and Jacky Truchot of Burgundy . are consigned to history once they can no longer make wine. Yet in CôRô, the story goes deeper. The gradual drinking-up of the Gentaz-Dervieux wines also represents the ebbing of a classic style. Yes, it still has a handful of excellent practitioners, but the profile of CôRô has been, as the wine writer Hugh Johnson once put it, .comprehensively reinterpreted.. Nowadays, rather than a perfumed delicacy, a bottle of CôRô is more likely to be a powerhouse, big and fruity and, especially when young, with the woody patina that comes from aging in new oak barrels. The CôRôs of Guigal epitomize this style. They are excellent wines, but a marked departure from the style that Gentaz-Dervieux and others followed in the past. The lavish praise they.ve received from critics and the high prices they fetch have influenced many. .Traditionalism is endangered,. said Mannie Berk, president of the Rare Wine Company, a leading wine importer, and a clear advocate for traditional CôRô. .Without greater awareness of the beauty of traditional CôRô, it could be largely gone within a generation.. All over the wine-producing world, the tension between traditional and modern techniques and styles has been well documented. Nowhere has this been more true than in Barolo and Barbaresco in the Piedmont region of Italy, where animosity split the region into two warring camps 25 years ago. Over time, though, the extreme positions softened, and many producers moderated their tone and practices. Partly, Mr. Berk suggested, this was because the vehement debate exposed consumers to the points of contention, allowing them to determine their own preferences. .There has been no such discussion in CôRô,. he said. .This is very different from Piedmont, where there is a far greater awareness of producers. styles, a fact that I think has been hugely helpful in re-establishing traditionalism there.. In an effort to foster such a discussion, Mr. Berk recently organized a small dinner in New York to explore the various styles of CôRô. In addition to him and several others from Rare Wine, the guests included Stephen Grant, who collects Rhôwines; Peter Sisseck, the proprietor of Dominio de Pingus in Ribera del Duero, whose wines are imported by Rare Wine and who happened to be passing through New York . and me. The wines were selected by Mr. Berk to represent the different styles, and included several from Gentaz-Dervieux. CôRô is famously translated as .roasted slope,. implying hot weather. In fact, CôRô, a tiny appellation less than 25 miles south of Lyon near the town of Ampuis, may represent the northernmost cool-climate limit for growing the syrah grape. It is dominated by a network of ancient terraced granite vineyards on an impossibly steep slope facing south into the sun, which bathes the vines in light more than in heat. While the wines of the northern Rhôare esteemed today, 30 years ago they were hardly known. Kermit Lynch, the pioneering importer who first brought the wines of Gentaz-Dervieux to the United States, recalled his first visits to the region in the late 1970s. .It was really about as rustic as it got, the northern Rhô just totally lost in time,. he told me last week. .The American public had never really heard about it, and even in France the reputation was very local.. As the wines became better known, CôRô was naturally compared with Hermitage, its northern Rhôsibling just to the south. In the gender-specific thinking of this Romance-language culture, the more burly, powerful Hermitage was described as masculine, while the more aromatic, delicate CôRô was called feminine. Enhancing this impression was that, while red wines of the northern Rhôare otherwise 100 percent syrah, CôRô alone is permitted to blend in small amounts of viognier, which can lighten and perfume the wine. At our dinner, we tasted 16 wines. Starting with six from the 2006 vintage, we went backward in time through two .95s, two .88s, two .83s, two .82s, an .80 and a .78. The idea was to include both traditional and modern interpretations, but it quickly became clear that this dichotomy was too simple, that an entire range of styles was before us. Two of the .06s were clearly modern. A Jean-Michel Gerin Les Grandes Places was dominated by oak, yet I could detect a pleasing savory scent of roasted meat underneath the sweet veneer. A Christophe Bonnefond Les Rochains was sleek and oaky. But a Yves Cuilleron Terres Sombres, also made with new oak, seemed to offer so much more, with the aroma of violets, bright fruit and bacon. Why? .It.s made with stems,. Mr. Grant said. .It.s got something going on that you can.t kill with new oak.. In the past, most producers in the northern Rhôfermented their syrah in whole bunches of grapes with stems intact, but today most producers remove the stems, which can add harsh tannins but also a welcome savory element. The next three .06s were not so modern. A Domaine Jamet was gorgeous: pure, graceful and precise with savory, multifaceted flavors and structure . my kind of CôRô, a wine that could come from nowhere else. A CôBlonde imported by Rare Wine, from Renéostaing (a producer who was a nephew of Mr. Gentaz and took over his vines) was also pure, with an elegant texture and a lovely, clear expression of fruit, including a touch of apricot (possibly from viognier?). By contrast, a Bernard Levet Journaries showed off the funky side of CôRô with a not-unattractive barnyard aroma that changed in the glass, becoming meaty and floral then funky again. This was perhaps a sign of reduction, a quality in wine that comes from a lack of exposure to air. Syrah is prone to reduction, especially when made the old-fashioned way. The trick for winemakers is to manage it so that it does not mar the wine permanently. Now it was time to head backward. A .95 Jamet, 11 years older than the .06, seemed paradoxically less ready to drink. Even so, its elegance, balance and beauty were apparent. A .95 Pierre Barge CôBrune was more rustic, lovely but lacking the precise aromas and flavors of the Jamet. An .88 Jasmin was corked, sadly. The next wine was an .88 from Gentaz-Dervieux. Please forgive the gushing, but what a brilliant wine: aromatically beautiful, complex and graceful, with flavors that lingered long after I swallowed. This wine was not an expression of power, but of elegance and finesse, and it had many years left to it. If wines could still be made like this, why aren.t they? Mr. Lynch described Mr. Gentaz as a simple-spoken farmer, with a cement fermentation tank, a wooden press and old barrels in a garage. It.s a local model that perhaps has little place in a globalized business. The future was represented by an .83 Guigal La Mouline. It had an alluring aroma of licorice and smoked meat, but even at almost 30 years of age, oak tannins were still apparent on the palate. An excellent wine for sure, but a world away from the Gentaz-Dervieux. I won.t mention every other wine that we tasted. Significantly, an .82 Rostaing La Landonne was beautiful, and an .82 Gentaz-Dervieux might have been even more transcendent than the .88 (though a 1980 was corked). A few producers still work in the Gentaz vein, like Levet and Barge. Far more CôRôs are in the modern style, like the Guigal, Gerin and Bonnefond. But a bright middle exists as well, with producers like Rostaing, Jamet and possibly even Cuilleron. These wines may not be traditional in the Gentaz sense, but they are what John Livingstone-Learmonth, the author of .The Wines of the Northern Rhô. calls .genuine CôRô,. which he told me was alive and well. Still, I can.t help feeling both honored to have drunk those Gentaz-Dervieux wines and melancholy that the world now has fewer bottles ahead of it. .There.s not a wine on the planet I.d rather have if given the choice,. Wells Guthrie, the proprietor of Copain Wine Cellars in California, told me recently. It should be noted that Mr. Guthrie.s Twitter handle is @Gentaz_rulz. FEBRUARY 7, 2012, 11:54 AM Why Syrah Hasn.t Caught On in America By ERIC ASIMOV Evan Sung for The New York Times .Why don.t Americans drink syrah?. This question came up recently at a dinner devoted to exploring the wines of CôRô, one of the world.s benchmark syrah wines. My column this week considers the various styles of CôRô, and inherent in the piece, I think, are some answers worth pondering. First of all, I think we asked the wrong question. The real issue is why Americans don.t buy syrah. This question has caused great heartache and controversy, especially in the California syrah business, which I explored in detail a couple of years ago. The CôRô dinner raised the issue again because the wines before us were so gorgeous and had such distinctive characters. We focused on the spectrum of CôRô styles available today, from traditional producers like Bernard Levet to modern producers like Yves Cuilleron. Then we went back in time, drinking some of the foremost examples of the modern style, like an .83 Guigal La Mouline, and great examples of traditional CôRô, culminating in several bottles from the legendary Marius Gentaz. All these wines demonstrate the rewards of properly merging grape and place. In the wines of Gentaz-Dervieux, the story of the 20th-century culture of CôRô shines through pure and unalloyed. You could argue that the wines of Guigal convey the story of Guigal as much as the story of CôRô, but the character of the land remained. Certainly, Americans buy CôRô when made by Guigal. They.ll even pay hundreds of dollars a bottle. These can be great wines, though perhaps atypical. But I fear that their stylistic legacy . ultra-ripe syrah fruit and lots of new oak flavor, especially when made with grapes from less distinctive sites by less experienced winemakers . results in too many wines of little character. This, I suggest, is why American don.t buy a lot of syrah: Too many of the wines seem generic, a blend of fruit and oak that may be vaguely pleasant but could come from anywhere and be made of any grape. Conversely, the best American syrahs, in my opinion, are made by producers who have been inspired by the great traditionalists of the northern Rhô Talk to Nathan Roberts or Duncan Meyers of Arnot-Roberts, which makes great California syrah, and they want to talk about Raymond Trollat, who made such wonderful St.-Josephs before he retired. Wines by Trollat and other Rhôluminaries like Auguste Clape of Cornas speak in a far broader vocabulary than simply fruit and oak. They are savory testimony to the complex character of syrah when it is grown in the proper place. By the way, not all of the northern Rhôis the proper place. Appellations have been unconscionably expanded to include areas that are not at all suitable for good wine, or rather, distinctive wine. Obviously, California is not the northern Rhô The soils, climate and other conditions are different. But the sorts of savory flavors achieved by the best syrah producers in the Rhôcan at least suggest what qualities make syrah distinctive, and what educated consumers might want in the wines. That.s my short answer to the question of why Americans don.t buy syrah. What are your thoughts? -- ------------------------------ * Dr. James Ellingson, jellings(a)me.umn.edu * * mobile : 651/645-0753 * * Great Lakes Brewing News, 1569 Laurel Ave., St. Paul, MN 55104 * * james(a)brewingnews.com James.Ellingson(a)StThomas.edu *