I am trying to fit in the three months of wine club selections from my club The Fine Wine Source in Livonia, Michigan.   You may have noticed that basically the world shut down for a period of time and in Michigan after a hundred days, I stopped counting, because of the ups and downs of the lockdown, that is being seen and felt elsewhere as well.  Every month, there are two bottles of wine that are selected for the club selection, one Old World and one New World.   It is always a mystery, what the wines will be, until the day of picking them up.  This past pick-up of wine, I actually picked up three months of wines, because the wine shop was not considered essential, because they only sell wine.  They don’t sell beer, liquor, lottery tickets or potato chips.

Famille Cornut or the Cornut family is now in their ninth generation of vignerons and over the years they have shown patience, understanding, dedication, hard work towards a terroir that continues the long history of winemaking.  Costieres de Nimes is the southernmost point of the Rhone and only recently after the AOC Costieres de Nimes was granted in 1989, and before that they were VDQS Costieres du Gard and were officially under the administration of the Languedoc; in 2004 there were transferred to the Rhone.  To carry the AOC Costieres de Nimes, wines require Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre to make up at least sixty percent of the finished red and rosé wines and the balance can be Cinsault, Marselan and Carignan.  There are also white wines that can be made with the AOC and they must be made from Grenache Blanc, Marsanne and Roussanne, but this is a very small amount.

Chateau Guiot Costieres de Nimes Appellation d’Originene Protegee 2017 shows the hard work the Cornut Family exercised when they acquired Chateau Guiot in 1975, the property was only fourteen hectares and is now one-hundred hectares in size and in the last three years a conversion to organic wine making throughout the vineyard.   This wine is a blend of half Grenache and half Syrah and aged in a mix of concrete and Stainless Steel to allow the classic red fruits and spiciness of the two grapes to be savored.  It will be an interesting wine to try.