Flight of the Condrieu
A very good day of very much Viogner.
The American novelist, Jay McInerney, wrote ‘Cult of Condrieu’ as a column for Town & Country magazine more than a quarter of a century ago. It compared Condrieu wines to both the poetry of Keats and the Tahitian period of Gaugin. I read it around that time. As a young wino, I had become a fan of the wine by accident of ordering a bottle on big night out. Even before that, in my 1980s teenage years, I had been a fan of the author’s, having read Bright Lights Big City as a literary precocious teenager.
The writer and the wine are fused together in my wine addled mind. Bearing this in mind, I thought I might try McInerney’s second person BLBC device for this post:
It’s Thursday morning and you are in Ampuis. You have taken a bus from Tain, leaving the hill of the Hermitage like the tangle of dirty sheets in your hotel room. It’s the last stop of your Rhône Valley tour that began in the grand halls of the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. You have Mistral memories of Grenache and limestone, but now things have got hard. Granite hard. You remember that this town is the Côte Rôtie town, and need to get yourself serious for Syrah, but it’s still morning and you have jasmine flowers, stone fruit and Viogner on your mind…
I could and would go on, but this Substack is about me, not “you” nor Jay McInerney, so it’s back to first person and the day I tasted, then drank, more Condrieu than I have ever in my life. And probably more Condrieu than I had ever tasted or drunk in my life before that happy day. Life is not bad with a glass of Condrieu in one’s/my/your hand.
There were two improbable venues for my Condrieu Nirvana. The first was in the community centre gymnasium in Ampuis. This town is in the heart of, and the bottom of the steep slopes of the Côte Rôtie. Ampuis is also the site of the Guigal family’s castle, and where you can see their big sign on the terraced vineyards on top of the town.
The other place, or the continuing venue later that evening, was a night club on the river flats by the town of Condrieu, which is just a few clicks south of Ampuis on the west (right) bank of the Rhône. The formal tasting of the day turned into a party hosted by the “young generation of winemakers” in Condrieu and the neighbouring Côte-Rôtie*. There the youth were joined by old hands too, and magnums flowed freely
That Thursday night party was the last event on the last night of a trip up the Rhône Valley from Avignon in Provence up to Vienne, just south of Lyon. I travekled there as a guest of Inter Rhône, or the Rhône Valley Vineyards, the professional organization that promotes the wines that are made in the region and holds the biennial trade show, Découvertes en Vallée du Rhône, which I went to France to attend.
At the beginning of the trip, waiting to board the plane in Toronto, I met my food and wine writing colleague and traveling companion James Chatto, who immediately confessed to looking forward to the Condrieu tasting and party. I agreed and said what I had been thinking since I saw it on the program: if I managed a glass of Condrieu once a year, it was a good year.
The problem with Condrieu is that there is not a lot of it; just 220 hectares (about 550 acres) under vine. Not that long ago there was considerably less and it looked liked there might not be any more; production had shrunk to just 14 hectares in the late1960s. Georges Vernay is credited with reviving Condrieu and the Viognier grape by encouraging his neighbours to reinvest in it, and by the time Jay McInerney was writing about Condrieu it had re-established itself and become a luxury brand wine.
There’s not going to be a lot more Condrieu in any event. Looking up at the steep, staked, dry stone wall terraced vineyards rising up from the Rhône, it’s clear that it needs to be picked by hand. There’s also only so much of Condrieu’s particular stony granite soil sites. I am skeptical of a lot of terroir marketing, but it does seem to be true that Viognier grown anywhere else just does not quite taste like Condrieu.
Condrieu also needs to be picked at just the right time. Condrieu’s magic lies in its ability to show fruit, aromatics and freshness despite the relatively low acidity of the Viognier grape. As Pierre Jean Villa explained at the tasting, Viognier in Condrieu must be harveted “precisely” on the exact day just ripeness has been achieved, before acidity is about to be lost. The point is that it’s not cheap to make.
The scarcity of Condrieu is not just a question of supply. I talked to an importer on the trip at the tasting salon in Ampuis. He told me about the difficulty selling Condrieu in North America, explaining that on restaurant wine lists it competes with whites from Burgundy or Napa. Consumers tend to go with the regions they recognize. There’s a kind of vicious cycle at play where consumers don’t have experience with and recognize Condrieu because it’s scarce, and it’s scarce because consumers don’t recognize it.
Connoisseurs, of course know better, and we take it whenever we find it. We want the paradox of a wine that is both florally aromatic and deeply fuit forward, with peaches and maybe a bit of mellow yellow pear. We want unctiousness and nectar like weight. We want freshness without the bite of acid. We want sunshine on granite.
What’s it like to taste and sip through a few dozen Condrieu in a day and night? Good. It’s really good.
Support my work and this newsletter by becoming a MJ Wine Box paid subscriber. Sign up today and recieve 20% off for life. Click on the button below to redeem this offer.
Or, spread joy and insider wine knowledge with a gift subscription for friends, family, colleagues or whoever and save 20% off of the regular fee.
WINE RECOMMENDATIONS
No Condrieu to recommend this week, but there is a Viogner from the Languedoc that is analagous in style, ticks many of the same boxes, and it compliments two great value reds: an organic Grenache-based Rhône and a fancy Dolcetto from Piedmont. All to be found in this week’s LCBO Vintages release…