Читать книгу The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France - Season by Delicious Season - Richard Olney - Страница 18

The southern part of the Rhône Valley, near Avignon, produces one splendid red wine, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, whose qualities are sometimes masked by an excess of alcohol content. A good Châteauneuf acquires a great deal of elegance with age. A few of the Châteauneuf vineyards make a small quantity of white wine—that of the Domaine de Mont-Redon is particularly successful. Tavel, Chusclan, and Lirac produce rosé wines, highly perfumed, with perhaps too high an alcoholic content to drink with the abandon that, well chilled, they incite.

Traveling north, the wines of Crozes-Hermitage and Hermitage, both red and white, are remarkable, less overpowering than their southern neighbors, and finally, as one approaches Lyons, the Côte-Rôtie is perhaps the subtlest of the Côtes-du-Rhône reds. All are made with a number of different grape varieties, of which the Syrah dominates in the Côte-Rôtie and the Grenache (a variety useful in raising the alcohol content of a wine) too often dominates in the Châteauneufs. All are, at best, ideal red meat, game and cheese wines.

A famous white wine, the Château Grillet, is made in the Côte-Rôtie area, but so limited is its production that it belongs, essentially, to the realm of wine literature.