2024 Domaine Franck Balthazar, Côtes du Rhône Rouge, Rhône Valley, France.
The lovely, dark hued, spicy and aromatic Côtes du Rhône Rouge by Franck Balthazar was just what the doctor ordered last night and was perfect with my basic Friday night pizza, it showed off any old school and brambly medium/full palate of briar laced vine picked berry, damson plum, black cherry and tangy blueberry fruits, as well as raw peppercorns, tapenade, truffle, violet florals, minty licorice and sagey garrigue. This deep purple/garnet colored wine, 60 % Syrah and 40% Grenache, feels much more Northern Rhône in the mouth and delivers more restrained alcohol with only about 12.5% in this vintage, which makes it a stylish quaffer and delicious with food, when compared to the more heady versions that are common these days, more in line with Chave, Clape, Saint Cosme and Gramenon, which are some of my favorites. The Balthazar approach in the cellar is just as “old school,” as you’d imagine from tasting the wine, where his time-honored regime includes usually whole-cluster, native-yeast fermentations in concrete vats. Employing manual cap punch downs with lengthy macerations and aging the wines in old, neutral demi-muid barrels before bottling without fining or filtration. Please note, for the Côtes du Rhône, in order to make it approachable, saw mostly de-stemmed berries, and macerations last only 12 to 14 days, but was matured in the old casks, some stainless tank and some concrete vats for between 6 and 9 months with just a light filtering at bottling. The results are quite pleasing, clean and fresh in acidity, and this wine offers a ton of charm for the money, drink over the next 3 to 5 years, and a big thank you to Jannae Lizza of Elevage Wines for sharing this one with me.
To say the Balthazar estate in Cornas is an old school winery, is very much an understatement and Franck Balthazar takes his family’s history very seriously and pays tribute to them in his wines, which are faithful to their traditions, though he has reached new levels of quality here. The Balthazar domaine dates to 1931, when it was founded by Franck’s grandfather, Casimir, after which his dad René took charge in 1950 and, by the 1970s, he was estate-bottling a small part of his production, following the lead of local legends Auguste Clape and Noël Verset. The balance of his output continued to be sold in cask to local cafes, just as René’s father’s generation had done. Franck, who took the reins here in 2002, now bottles all his tiny Cornas production under his label and added a few speciality bottlings like this one to the lineup. All the wines are made by methods that are little changed from those of his father and grandfather, in their rustic cellars. Most of the estate’s (Cornas) vineyards are planted to “la Petite Syrah”, the ancient local clone of Syrah whose small, olive-shaped berries produce a wine of greater aromatic complexity than some of the more modern clones. Balthazar is so committed to his own form of organic, nature friendly viticulture, and again with the traditional ways of his ancestors, which includes no chemicals or pesticides and he even plows many of his vine rows with a horse. The parcels used for the Balthazar Côtes du Rhône are set on classic hardened clay and limestone soils with a sandy and stony overlay, common to the Southern zones, but does not get the over ripe or overtly fruity profile, as this elegantly poised 2024 shows clearly in the bottle. I do highly recommend the top flight of Cornas here at Balthazar first and foremost, but this bargain should be on your radar!
($25 Est.) 91 Points, grapelive