Top 100 wines of Condrieu

Last year, there was much mirth on wine Twitter about a particularly excruciating tasting note. You’re right. The wine trade needs to get out more. But still… this one was a beauty. It began well enough – really quite beautiful, in fact. But before long the imaginative descriptions were getting more ornate and strained. It moved from poetic to meaningless before finishing with a reference to Burnt Norton – the first of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets – that put it firmly in Private Eye magazine’s ...

Emmanuelle Verset is the sixth generation to make wine in her family, and represents the E in Domaine A&E Verset. The A is for Alain, her father. She took over from him in 2016 at the age of 24, and is one of the few female winemakers in Cornas. The Verset name runs deep in this part of the Rhône. You might have heard of Noël Verset (1919 – 2015), whose bottles are highly sought-after today – Noël was Alain’s uncle. Scroll down to see Matt Walls tasting notes and scores for six Domaine A& ...

By 1965, the vineyards of Condrieu had largely been abandoned – phylloxera and two world wars had decimated the place and its people. There were just 8ha of vines remaining on these granite slopes. If it weren’t for the hard work of a few steadfast vignerons, the appellation might have disappeared entirely, reclaimed by the forest. Thankfully, Condrieu survived and has since flourished – but great appellations have been lost before. We know this because some have recently been rediscovered. In f ...