Had the two wines last week while dining at the very delicious Kismet in Hollywood/silverlake
Oh sweet sweet Allemand. How fragrant is thy nose. How beautiful is thy palate. Once again showing why Allemand is one of the absolutely unique wines being produced today.
Not many domaines can capture elegance, power and energy in every bottle. As much as I like Juge for its wild energy or Verset for its classic purity, Allemand Reynard is the complete package. Since 2004 he’s been on fire.
Great side by side comparison. The 05 shows that deep bundled up , burly and concentrated vintage. Immense palate but showing well with a hour of air as there are no hard tannic edges but you know it has decades ahead of it as there’s still much more to unfurl and develop. Everything is lying underneath the surface waiting to explode.
The 06 on the other hand is bright and lively with energy coursing through. Drinking very well right now. It’s so easy to drink but not lacking in purity and complexity.
I’ve got only 1 bottle of the 2005 Reynard I’m protecting for some special occasion, but I’m well stocked on 2006’s and they’re such a treat. It’s also a year where the Chailot shows really well vs '07 where the Chaillot is a significant step down.
I’m a big fan of the 2003 but I also agree when you go back to 2001 or earlier the wines are still very good but not worth the crazy pricing for those early years.
Thanks for the TNs and especially good to know that the 06 is doing well. I’ve multiple 06, but (sadly) none of that terrific-sounding 05. Hopefully, the 06 can carry on that excellent Allemand tradition.
oh yes! Can’t forget the 03. We had an 01 with us, but also had two btls of mugneret gibourg feusselottes. It was getting pretty late so we didn’t pull that fifth bottle. Would have been a fun comparison. Never had the 01. Will have to get into it next time
nothing is wrong. They are still very good wines. I think the 98 is drinking fantastic and the 89 is an eyes in the back of the head wine, but I don’t think he’s hit to the point where his wines are now. There’s a different purity to the wines now. They aren’t quite as clunky and big. Really in the zone. A good comparison is actually the wines we had next to it, the Mugneret Gibourg, another producer that I don’t feel really was in their stride in the 80s/90s as the wines don’t stand out as they do now.
The 1995 Chaillots I had last week would disagree with that assessment. The Mugneret wines are better than ever, but bottles from the 80s at the Tahn Dihn in the mid-90s were what started my addiction to the wines. Likewise, when I first started with Allemand in 1994 vintage it was immediately apparent that something interesting was happening. This bottle 1995 Chaillot had an almost Burgundian grace with real verve and length but was style readily identifiable as Cornas. Incidentally, I would call Verset wines wild and sauvage and the Juge wines idiosyncratic and not really inspiring to me.
My experience with 90s Allemand were that they were not big, and to some extent, not clunky either. If I recall correctly, 1996 might be the exception as I remember that to be quite on the wild/stern/clunky side. But for the most part, I thought that the 90s I had were more on the elegant and finesse side of things with less rusticity and wildness, and this is relative to the other Cornas wines from the same era. I haven’t had the urge to pull from the offsite Allemands from 2000s fearing that they’ll just be too young for my taste. But when I had them earlier, except the 2007/2008 Reynard which I thought were big and backward, I agree that they maintained the finesse and elegance that I noted from the 90s wines
You know, I think another thing is that I was lucky to glom onto the wines early and all of my bottles are from the original importer bought on release and stored by me ever since. While Cornas isn’t exactly delicate, I think that sort of provenance really makes a difference. The cork was perfect and only stained where it touched the wine.
Count me as another one who doesn’t understand any reference to a decline in quality going prior to 2004 or a description of Allemand as ever having been clunky. Harmonious, pure and vibrant were descriptors that I used fairly often for the wines from both the '90s and the 2000s.
I always thought of them as more civilized (in a good way) than the (also in a good way) more wild Versets.
And many thanks to nathan who introduced me to the wines at a long ago dinner at Inside restaurant around 20 years ago when he opened some 1994s.
While I generally agree that there was no fundamental change in winemaking by Allemand circa 2004, I will give Charlie a bit of help here by mentioning that I had heard (and this is just rumor, not a fact) that he bought new barrels for the 2001 vintage (perhaps not replacing everything, but maybe just some old barrels or merely adding some new ones to increase capacity). 2002 was a horrible vintage in Cornas. 2003 was, of course, 2003 (although Allemand did okay all things considered). So 2004 does kind of mark a point when both (1) the vintages returned to normalcy and (2) the new barrels had been used a few times. It’s also possible that if he was using some pretty old barrels in the late 1990s (thus needing to replace them in 2001), that the wines from 2004 onward may show slightly differently (and whether that is good or not can be the subject of debate, but it would explain Charlie’s reaction).
This is all just conjecture of course. f*ck if I know anything.
You must have got some before Dressner poured the rest in his glass…
Civilized Cornas is how I think about Allemand after being raised on Verset and Clape (and Michel and Juge, whom I liked less). Some folks even use the term “modern” but given what other folks are doing I don’t think that descriptor is apt.
