Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The top Cornas here is the 2016 Cornas la Sabarotte. It’s aging in 80% new oak until being bottled in June 2018. Yes, it’s an unabashedly modern style, full-bodied, creamy in texture and offering pristine purple raspberry fruit, but man is this good. It will be hard to keep from drinking this in its first 5-10 years.
Range: 94-96 -
Jeb Dunnuck
Lastly, the 2016 Cornas La Sabarotte is more plump, rounded, and sexy, with thrilling amounts of plum and black fruits, barbecue smoke, licorice, and spiced meat aromas and flavors. With moderate acidity, a massive, sexy texture, sweet tannins, and a great finish, it’s unquestionably one of the most flamboyant, sexy wines in the vintage. Drink it any time over the coming decade.
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Wine Spectator
Alluring, with a gilding of modern-style mocha and bacon-accented toast that melds perfectly into the core of gently steeped plum and blackberry fruit, while light black olive, anise and juniper notes add range and texture through the finish. Best from 2021 through 2036.
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.