Winemaker Notes
This Syrah (made with 5% Viognier) combines a powerful side with very floral notes. It is a dark wine offering a mineral nose with notes of smoke, black fruit, black olive, and pepper -- always enhanced by a floral component. It is aromatic on the palate, with firm but smooth tannins, and a beautiful lingering finish. Its aromatic mouth, with well-built but smoothed tannins, continues in a beautiful final length. An immediate pleasure that slowly, over the years, grows to be the most typical expression of the Syrah from Cote-Rotie.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Vibrant cherries, cassis, green peppers, cedar and violets with raspberry and grapefruit aromas. The palate has a fresh, sleek and elegant delivery of blackcurrant and purple-cherry flavors with lemon verbena and cassis fruit, delivered amid fine, succulent tannins. Try from 2023.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Vernay's 2016 Cote Rotie Blonde du Seigneur has 5% Viognier and spent 18 months in 30% new oak. It's a lovely wine, brimming with perfumes of violets, roses and jasmine, plus plenty of raspberry fruit, all framed by hints of pencil shavings. It's medium to full-bodied yet with a delicately silky texture and ample freshness on the long finish.
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Wine Spectator
Enticing blackberry and raspberry fruit flavors are melded together with singed savory, dark olive and fresh bay accents in this lovely red, which has a sleek feel through the finish, with just a light gilding of toast to add range. Drink now through 2030.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The only 2016 Côte Rôtie bottled, the 2016 Côte Rôtie Blonde du Seigneur incorporates 5% Viognier and spent 18 months in barrel and foudre, with just a small part being new. It offers beautiful red and black berry fruits intermixed with notions of smoked meats, spice, and mint. This elegant, seamless 2016 is impeccably balanced and will keep for 7-8 years, probably longer.
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.”
The cultivation of vines here began with Greek settlers who arrived in 600 BC. Its proximity to Vienne was important then and also when that city became a Roman settlement but its situation, far from the negociants of Tain, led to its decline in more modern history. However the 1990s brought with it a revival fueled by one producer, Marcel Guigal, who believed in the zone’s potential. He, along with the critic, Robert Parker, are said to be responsible for the zone’s later 20th century renaissance.
Where the Rhone River turns, there is a build up of schist rock and a remarkable angle that produces slopes to maximize the rays of the sun. Cote Rotie remains one of the steepest in viticultural France. Its varied slopes have two designations. Some are dedicated as Côte Blonde and others as Côte Brune. Syrahs coming from Côte Blonde are lighter, more floral, and ready for earlier consumption—they can also include up to 20% of the highly scented Viognier. Those from Côte Brune are more sturdy, age-worthy and are typically nearly 100% Syrah. Either way, a Cote Rotie is going to have a particularly haunting and savory perfume, expressing a more feminine side of the northern Rhone.