Alain Verset Cornas 2015

Alain Verset wines are produced in extremely small quantities by a determinedly traditional native of Cornas. Alain is the nephew of the legendary Cornas producer Noël Verset who is crucial in the history of the region. By the late seventies, Cornas had just 50 hectares of vines having suffered great losses from the phylloxera epidemic toward the end of the 19th century, the Great Depression and two world wars. Also the number of men working those vines was far reduced from a century earlier. Among the few who remained was Noël Verset, whose career spanned the time between Phylloxera and Cornas’ rebirth in the 1990s. Born in 1912 he joined his father on the steep granite slopes of Cornas in 1931 and continued to work as a winegrower for more than seven decades.

​Noël's nephew Alain carries on the tradition by making wines in the ‘old school’ way. There is no destemming of bunches (keeping the tannic fabric of the wine for long aging potential); whole bunches are fermented for 10-15 days in concrete vats under the family home; he uses a basket press to squeeze the handpicked grapes and get maximum extraction; he uses only indigenous yeasts and ages in old barrels, usually for 2 years in 4-5 year old casks. Alain has about one hectare (2.5 acres) of vines in Cornas-Reynards, Mazards and Les Côtes, which is not enough to support his family of five children, so he has been working at a factory during the week making garbage cans. Apparently though, retirement will be soon and he will hopefully be able to bottle a little more wine. We have read that the total production is only about 900 bottles. Look for stony mineral and granite components with savory fruit notes revealing themselves after aeration. 100% Syrah.

Cornas has a very long history of grape growing and winemaking. The Romans are believed to have planted vines in Cornas 2000 years ago, and by the 10th century, the Canon of Viviers was writing that the church in Cornas was ‘surrounded by vines.’ The Cornas vineyards today cover 130 ha (about 320 acres), almost exactly the same area as Hermitage. And given the boundaries of the appellation and the nature of the terrain there’s little room for growth. In comparison, Côte-Rôtie is more than twice the size. Cornas does not have as long of a history as its neighbors in the northern Rhône of bottling and exporting its wines. Until the 1950s, much of the wine was still being sold by the winemakers ‘en vrac’, in bulk, to local restaurants who would sell by the glass or by the carafe straight from the barrel, or to private individuals who would carry out their own bottling. It was only once a small number of merchant houses, particularly Paul Jaboulet and Delas Frères, started buying and blending wines from smaller producers and bottling the results under their own labels that Cornas started to be seen outside the immediate region.