St. Cosme Côtes du Rhône Rouge 2020

Pairing Ideas: Roasted red meat with potatoes and sautéed root vegetables is a natural pairing for this blackberry, smoked bacon, coal, blueberry, rose petaled laced red wine.

This wine is Syrah. Partially destemmed fruit. Limestone sand, red clay and pebbles on Villafranchian terraces. Tank ageing.

When I made my first Cotes du Rhone in 1997, my father Henri Barruol drew the label in Indian ink portraying the pretty lodge located at the entrance to the estate. Never could I have imagined at that time that the wine would become so popular with our customers. The original idea was to make a Syrah-based Côtes du Rhône, unlike virtually all Côtes du Rhône which is generally made from Grenache. We wanted to make a fruit-forward, rounded, fresh wine. Those ideas remain unchanged – they still have currency and I try and ensure incremental progress in our Côtes du Rhône with every passing year. Obviously, we are always dependent on what the vintage gives us but in actual fact, for this particular wine, the 2020 is very similar to the 2019 – the fruit was ripe and absolutely stunning. The resultant wine shows lush black fruit, it is rounded and fleshy with a salinity that calls for a fine steak. This wine has a short vatting period, the technique used by my father. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s, Saint Cosme’s Gigondas only spent 15 days in vats! At the time, it was the norm and the wines were brimming with fruit and freshness, though could still age marvelously.