2005 Cornas Chante Perdrix

Inky.ruby. Brooding cassis and plum on the nose, with a subtle peppery quality adding energy. Not very giving on the palate, which offers chewy dark fruit preserve and fruitcake flavors and finishes with chewy tannins and a hit of espresso. Seems a bit sullen today.

Inky purple. Powerful, smoky dark berry aromas, with deeper accents of chocolate, tobacco and candied licorice. Very ripe suggestions of roasted cherry and dark berry liqueur carry through the finish. The tannins are nicely woven into the fruit and there's a gentle acid lift on the finish but this is a fairly musclebound, chunky wine.

Delas has always made a robust, masculine Cornas, and the 2005 Cornas Chante Perdrix is a seriously endowed blockbuster. Notes of roasted meats, animal fur, scorched earth, blackberries, and cassis are present in this full-bodied, tannic, primordial wine. It requires 5-6 years of bottle age, and should drink well for three decades. ||As I have written many times in the past, this famous estate, which muddled along in the seventies, eighties, and early nineties, was reborn when its owners, the Deutz-Roederer Champagne enterprise, brought in the super-talented Jacques Granges, and gave him carte blanche to redo the cellars and elevate the level of quality. Since his first vintage, 1997, Delas has become one of the superb purveyors of high quality Rhone wine. I have enormous admiration for what Granges has accomplished. His most recent vintages, 2005 and 2006, have been brilliant and he continues to do a superb job with the white wines Readers should also know that Delas recently purchased 37 acres of vines in Crozes-Hermitage, so they will be augmenting their production from that appellation. The bottled 2005 reds include some interesting efforts from some of the better villages in the south. The Chateauneuf du Papes and Cotes du Rhones were reviewed in issue #173 (October, 2007) Wine Advocate.February, 2008