TN: 2013 Guillaume Gilles Cornas La Combe de Chaillot

WINE TALK
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  • 2013 Guillaume Gilles Cornas La Combe de Chaillot - France, Rhône, Northern Rhône, Cornas (5/24/2017)
    Fascinating wine. Intense and perfumed, but very light on its feet. Brambly, leafy, dark fruit with smoked meat accents - like a blackberry cobbler with smoked bacon strewn overtop. Silky texture with a medium finish - I’m left wondering how this will evolve with the time it so clearly needs. (93 pts.)

Posted from CellarTracker (Note that notwithstanding the picture, my note was on the 2013 and weighed in at 13% ABV).

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Interesting note, thanks. I love Guillaume Gilles.

I’ve actually never tried or seen this wine – but the regular Cornas is one of the great bargains of the wine world.

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This is my first experience with Gilles. Rosenthal has a bit of info on the wine on their website:

Cornas La Combe de Chaillot: The only red in this cellar that suffers the fate of “destemming”. The vines are on the lower slopes of the Chaillot vineyard where the soil is granite with a slightly sandy consistency making for a less ferociously tannic wine, a touch more elegant and open in its youth. Also, the Combe de Chaillot is produced in miniscule quantity.

I note that there are couple of other wines listed on pre-arrival on the Macarthur’s website - a 2014 ‘Lieu-dit Chaillots’ and a 2015 ‘Nouvelle “R” Les Rieux,’ both priced above the La Combe de Chaillot.

Spurred by the gushing over Allemand on the board, I’m slowly overcoming my previous skepticism of Cornas, but not quite convinced to pay the tithe for the top shelf just yet. Do you have a sense of how Gilles stacks up against other producers?

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I really like Gilles’s flagship Cornas. If you look hard, you can find it in the range of $50 on release, and that’s highway robbery. It’s not Allemand, which in my view and everyone else’s is the pinnacle of the appellation, but it’s top tier and not that far off at all.

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That tends to be my sense from GG and Vincent Paris … even to some extent Alain verset. Really intense perfumed nose that screams cornas, but palate doesn’t seem to have weight. I don’t know if time will change that as i have no experience with the wines with age (mostly consumed young)

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Thanks for the insight, guys. Any feelings on Frank Balthazar’s wines? Another little known producer whose stuff seems well-regarded and (in comparison) reasonably priced.