So you hear all the hype, but it’s really just a tease because you don’t want to drop the big coin? Or maybe you picked up a few bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape to cellar, but you’re itching to pull the cork on some ‘07 Rhône? What’s an average Jane to do? Well, if you’re in on this little secret, you get to follow the wine insiders to the trough of exceptional value. Drink it in… deeply. You won’t regret picking up a few bottles (or even a case – while our meager supplies last) of the Domaine Gallety Côtes du Vivarais.

This wine is from the northern-most appellation in the Southern Rhône is going to put Vivarais on the wine geek’s map. It has all the intensity, all the virtuous beauty and balance of really good Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but it clocks in at less than a third of the price! If you’re drinking this wine now, or laying it down in your cellar, you’re ahead of the curve – in five or six years, Vivarais is going to be the new Chateauneuf, and you’ll remember when it was our little secret.

The wine is bright and beautiful right out of the bottle.  It’s got a gripping nose of lavender, black cherry, anise, tobacco and freshly tilled earth. The mouth is plush, velvety sleek, and deeply layered with truckloads of red and black fruit, blueberry pie, smoke and earth. And the balance – whew, it is incredible. I think this is the real character of the vintage. Everything is bigger – but it’s proportional. Somehow, those grapes fattened up nicely and didn’t lose any of their mouthwatering acidity or grippy tannins.

With just a few minutes of decanting you can pop one of these open now. If you’ve got the discipline, cellar a bottle or six – in 4 years, you’ll be very, very happy.

Domaine Gallety Côtes du Vivarais, 2007 – $23.00

Cairanne is a village in the Vaucluse region — just north of the Mediterranean coast.   It is a place of formidable independence.  During the middle ages, Cairanne was a walled enclave of the Knights Templar.  Petrarch, the 14th century poet who is strongly associated with the humanist origins of the Italian Renaissance, lived and worked nearby in Avignon.  During World War II, members of the resistance formed the Vaucluse Republic.   These are people who know their own minds.

From such a place, we get the southern Rhône wines of Cairanne, Gigondas, and some 20 other villages.  The better wines, including Domaine Catherine Le Gœuil,  are listed within the AOC Côtes du Rhône Villages.  Mme Le Gœuil is a leader in the movement for biodynamic wines from small producers.  Her wine is a lovely example of the art.

Tuta 12/13/09

Available at the shop for $16.75

Churchill’s is best known as an upstart port wine house (a mere 30 years old) which produces a respected line of ports.   Churchill’s Estates– a table wine — is a blend of classic port wine varietals: Touriga Nacional, Touriga Franca and Tinta Roriz.  (The last we know as Tempranillo.)  The grapes grow in the summer heat on terraces.  The dry soil, schist and slate, forces the vines to reach deep into the earth for moisture.

The wine is an imperial shade of purple.  The taste is fleshy and rich.  This is a dinner wine for people who like port.  It is full-bodied and dense.  It is not sugary — the yeast has done its work–but it is very good-natured.  This is a wine made for Silenus, the river god: unrestrained and lounging to this day among the steep hills of the Douro.

$14.75/Bottle

Tuta 12/6/09

Let’s choose 2007 Bricco delle Lepri Dolcetto di Dogliani from San Romano.  The label is unabashedly rural:  Bricco is a local word for “summit” or “top of the vineyard” where the finest grapes are thought to grow.  “Lepri” means “hares.”   So, “hill of the hares” — a  deeply agrarian name which does not call to mind ideological struggle.

The wine is excellent. It is inky, with the ripeness  of purple fruit — bruised, windfall plum and blackberry.  This wine has beautiful manners:  smoothly companionable and with just enough tannic structure or “bite” to offset its native sweetness.  “Dolcetto” — the name of the grape — does not refer to sugar but to the relative ease with which the vine, “the little sweet one,” is cultivated.

The region of Dogliani grew grapes long before 1046 when Oddo of Savoy added the Piedmont to his transalpine kingdom.  Occupied by Burgundians, wild Magyars, Saracens, and eight centuries of French overlords, the Piedmontese were among the first to rise up in favor of a unified, ethnically Italian state.

Can their wine have lagged behind?  Surely those plotters and revolutionaries of 1821 would have found little to sustain them in imported drink.  In these Piedmont wines, we seek an echo of the Risorgimento, the awakening of Italian aspirations, in a simple glass of wine.  It is a fragile thread which leads back into history, but the connection is real and the wine still comes from the same vineyard — the hill of the hares.

At Dedalus for $18.50  .

Tuta 8/24/09

But in the Catalan regions of France and Spain, there are small vignerons who produce straight carignan wine with devotion.  In Languedoc-Rousillion where the Pyrenées mountains fall into the Mediterranean, two cousins make a pure carignan from old vines under the name “Terre d’Ardoise” — land of slate.  This is a country wine — uncomplicated in its appeal, fragrant with dust and smoke, and just a little bitter.  The wine is concentrated by leaf pulling and discarding a portion of the unripe harvest.  The vines are very old and stand upright in sparse soil of black slate.   Such hardship could produce a wine of formidable acid and structure.  The cousins are clever in their wine-making, however, and the result is surprisingly soft and open.  This wine welcomes food, especially pork and bread.

Carignan is an interesting taste –earth, bracken, and hard fruit — and one we should know when we drink Rhône wines which often include a measure of carignan for color and spine.  You will find this one at Dedalus for $12.75

Tuta 7/20/09