originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Ouch! I know all the Clape vintages back to 1976, and 1997 is the only one I do not consider successful. When I showed up in October/November 1997 to taste 1996 and 1995, the 1997s had already finished their malos! Amazingly, the numbers (alcohol, acidity, etc.) for 1998 are identical to those for 1997, yet the wines are light years apart.
"Light" being the operative word. It was about 88˚ in the San Fernando Valley today and after a meeting in an un- air conditioned mobile home (don't ask) it seemed like the wine locker wouldn't be the worst place to spend an hour or two. I was met by a friend who had some car parts I needed and I had some wine he needed and we did our part to further the cashless economy. But, I digress.
My locker is deeper than it is wide so I've gotta move a bunch of boxes to find anything, particularly because whichever bottle I'm looking for, it's invariably in the back and on the bottom of the locker (not to mention that it's never in the box that it's indicated as being in on my most recent inventory, which was collated c. 1999). While rearranging stuff I ran across a bottle of the 1997 Clape Cornas, so with Claude's not-so-ringing review still clanking around in my mind, and because we'd worked up a powerful thirst moving boxes around, and because my friend isn't particularly picky and he'd never tasted Northern Rhne wines other than from Delas Freres, and because whatever resale value the 1997 Clape Cornas
might have had has been utterly destroyed by Claude's earlier notes in this topic, I snagged some glasses and poured it around for everyone else present who were also trying to find bottles in the back and on the bottom of their wine lockers (and who had worked up powerful thirsts).
The lockerists who were into Bordeaux and Burgundy liked the 1997, because it reminded them of Bordeaux and Burgundy, and besides,
it was French. The people who were into California Rhne-ish wines thought it was light and wimpy but would be good for when their mother-in-law dropped by. I thought that it was nicely balanced, with very pure Syrah fruit flavors offset by slightly higher acidity than I would expect. I had the 1997 Verset recently and it was pretty dreadful, so bad that I'm assuming that it was a bad bottle. 1997 Allemand Chaillot was a big improvement but still no great shakes compared to other Allemand vintages, at least not over and above the fact that it was identifiably Cornas when tasted blind.
If one really focusses on it, the Clape too has that definite Cornas fire and brimstone thing happening to it on the nose when first opened. That's faded back into the wine, and now, some three hours later (I brought the remains of the bottle home), it's an okay bottle of Syrah, more interesting aromatically than on the palate (said palate consisting of vegetable soup and asphalt), and a wine that, tasted blind,
could be pegged as probably being Cornas, but a case could be made that it might also be Crozes or maybe St Joseph or a bottle of Qupe Bien Nacido (not the Hillside Reserve). (BTW, to those of you diagramming along at home, my apologies for the structure of that last sentence).
In short, the 1997 Clape Cornas is not the vinous disaster hinted at above, but neither is it the bottle you want to pull out to taste when you're trying to convince someone that Old World Syrah is better than the crap they've been drinking. I don't begrudge the $40 or so I think I paid for it, but given the opportunity to rethink my purchase, I would probably should have blown the money on 1997 Baudry or Grange des Peres or something else that would have evolved into something at a higher plane of wine existence.
-Eden (we also opened the 1999 Ch de Trignon Gigondas, but it was - as Michael Butler would say - "corked like a wet dog")
BTW: Nice sunset tonight on the way home:
