Winemaker Notes
Alain Voge Cornas Les Chailles is marked by elegance, while conveying the typical character of Cornas and Saint-Péray.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
An attractive gush of fresh blackberry, boysenberry and fig is amply coated in salt in this full-bodied version. Seductive, with polished tannins giving a silky impression until they firmly shore up the finish. Tangy acidity keeps this pumping along, with savory details emerging and inviting another sip. Well-done. Drink now through 2035.
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Decanter
Sun-warmed rosemary and lavender, herbal and floral. This has some finesse and fruitiness on the palate, teamed with zingy acidity. It finishes dry and savoury; the fruit is a touch lean but there's some good structure here. It needs some time though, to take on weight. No new oak. In conversion to organic.
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Jeb Dunnuck
Ripe red and black fruits, cured meats, leather, pepper, and graphite notes all define the 2022 Cornas Les Chailles, a medium to full-bodied, balanced, serious Cornas that has solid structure, a layered, building mouthfeel, and a great finish. Coming from vines lower on the slopes, it was destemmed and brought up in used barrels. It will benefit from just a few years in the cellar and evolve nicely over the following decade or more. Drink 2027-2037.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2022 Cornas Les Chailles is brilliant, mingling aromas of dark wild berries and plums with hints of blueberries, mulberries and smoke. Medium to full-bodied, concentrated and structured, it's rich with an impressive reserve of dry extracts, a firm, dense structure and broad shoulder, sweet tannins and an expansive finish. Very youthful and a bit austere, it needs time to digest its élevage and its bottling. It's crafted from 50-year-old vines at the foot of the slopes and contains young vines at altitude. Entirely destemmed, it was matured for 18 months in used barrels.
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Vinous
The 2022 Cornas Les Chailles debuts with hints of ripe black cherry, dried violet, forest floor, cedar and cranberry. Refined and complex, the full-bodied 2022 hits the palate with elevated flavor concentration and captures vivid freshness. Long and focused, it checks out with tenacity on the savory finish.
Marked by an unmistakable deep purple hue and savory aromatics, Syrah makes an intense, powerful and often age-worthy red. Native to the Northern Rhône, Syrah achieves its maximum potential in the steep village of Hermitage and plays an important component in the Red Rhône Blends of the south, adding color and structure to Grenache and Mourvèdre. Syrah is the most widely planted grape of Australia and is important in California and Washington. Sommelier Secret—Such a synergy these three create together, the Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre trio often takes on the shorthand term, “GSM.”
Distinguished as a fine Syrah producing zone since the 18th century, Cornas, like Cote Rotie, is made up of vineyards covering steep and hard-to-work, granite terraces. As a result the region’s wines fell out of favor during the mid 20th century when the global market was more focused on bulk wines and vineyards that yielded high quantities. It wasn’t until the 1980s when a group of energetic young winemakers reestablished the integrity of these precipitous terraces and also began making an ultra-modern style of Syrah. The new style didn’t need a decade before it was drinkable and could reach the consumer faster than the region’s traditional wines. Given the new quality coming out of the zone, its popularity once again soared and today a good Cornas can easily challenge many of those from Hermitage. Characteristics of Syrah from Cornas include teeth-staining flavors of blackberry jam, plum, pepper, violets, smoked game, charcoal, chalk dust and smoke.