Domaine Grand Veneur Les Champauvrins 2007 Côtes du Rhône Villages

There's not much to do during Snowmageddon other than drink wine and blog about it. Caitlin was making pizza from scratch last night, and class was cancelled for today (surprise!), so it seemed like a good time to open a nice bottle. We bought this Cotes Du Rhone Villages together at the neighborhood liquor store after a wine tasting one Friday. We both really liked it, and it was on sale for $19. Not exactly the humblest of wines, but splitting the cost made it bearable.

Les Champauvrins is a single vineyard bordering Chateauneuf du Pape appelation (a legally defined geographical indication), first made known for winemaking by Pope Jean XXII in 1320. This is evident in the name of the region, meaning "New Castle of the Pope." The Jaume family, who run Grand Veneur Winery, began farming the region in 1826. The area is renowned for its soil, a base of marine sandstone layered with remnants of Alpine glaciers and rocks deposited by the Rhone. The winery practices green harvesting, which means that during the growing season, they go through the fields and selectively remove bunches of immature grapes. Although this process significantly decreases the winery's output, it allows the vines to give everything they have to the remaining bunches, ultimately producing better grapes and wine - quality over quantity logic.

This particular Cotes du Rhone Villages is a blend of 70% Grenache, 20% Syrah, and 10% Mourvedre. It is aged in stainless steel vats for 15 days with "pigeage". Pigeage is when the skins and stems, which naturally float to the top of the liquid, are manually submerged to increase their contribution to the flavor. Traditionally, people did this with their feet, like in the movies. If you Google "pigeage" there are some interesting image results.

I must confess we opened the bottle before the pizza was even in the oven. Even the cork in this wine was lovely. It was a proper cork (not agglomerate or the beloved screw top), and crested with the name of the current head of the estate, Alain Jaume. Beyond the cork, the wine was no disappointment. When I first tasted it, I thought OH! sweet! But then as it circled around my tongue and slid towards my throat, it opened up into something else. It took me a few sips to figure out what was happening, and for the first time I really understood what it means to say a wine is complex. Maybe it's because I've been paying more attention, or maybe it's because this wine cost more than $6, but it really tasted like a story. A childhood of rich syrupy fruit, a sweet and seductive adolescence, evolving gently into delicate refinement, and finishing with the subtle scars and callouses of a life well-lived. Sorry boys, but wine seems more like a woman to me.

If you can't tell, this wine was a win. So was the pizza, by the way.