2015 Northern Rhones - Cornas, Part 1

3/5/17 -

2015 has been touted as the vintage of the century, or the best since ____ (fill in the blank) and indeed it's a vintage in France that produced excellent wines in many regions.  There is a great deal of variation, of course, having to do with the level of heat during the late summer and the timing and quantity of rains that arrived in spring and again before and during the harvest. In Beaujolais, for instance, the early-ripening Gamay missed out on early moisture and suffered from summer heat, producing many wines with 14% to 15% of alcohol and awkward tannins. Happily, just to the south, where Marcel Guigal proclaimed 2015 the best vintage of his life, the vineyards of the northern Rhone received enough early rains to withstand the summer's heat and then again received needed moisture, although occasionally a bit too much, in mid-August and September. Which brings us to Cornas and the wines of Vincent Paris and Franck Balthazar. Here, with a bit of rain in mid-August, the grapes were in good shape but ripening had slowed due to dryness by the end of the month. Thierry Allemand started early, on August 29th and finished by September 8, while Vincent Paris waited, starting on September 17th, after some rain which enabled further maturition and brought freshness to the wine.