Notes from Rare Wine Co:

It can be hard to recall that tiny Cornas and its mere 110 hectares was once completely over-shadowed by much-larger Rhône appellations.

The zone’s terraced vineyards required a Herculean effort to work, and yet the wines’ prices remained stubbornly low well into the early 2000s. It was natural then that many of the zone’s youth in that era left for easier, better-paying jobs in nearby Valence or further afield. 

But the scene in Cornas today is vastly different: it is now a universally beloved hot spot for traditional Syrah, and its top bottlings are among the Northern Rhône’s most coveted. 

Its modern-day success story began to take form in the 1980s, when a handful of older growers’ success—including Clape, Verset, Michel and Juge—gave confidence to the next generation, encouraging them to return home.

One of that movement’s leaders is Franck Balthazar, who left his textile factory job in 2002 to answer the siren song of Cornas’ steep granite slopes. He took over his family’s small estate and adopted, and then expanded upon, the classic farming and winemaking methods of his father, René. 

Within a decade, he had established this estate as home to perhaps the most expressive, and rigorously traditional, wines in not just Cornas, but the entire Northern Rhône.