It was a fat-bottomed bottle, deep green, antique looking and charming. The price of this Cotes du Rhone white, $6.99 at a local liquor store, was also charming.
My first impressions: a plain, glowing pale yellow color; syrupy in the glass; in taste, bread-like, dry, seeming to fill the front of the mouth with a certain bitterness; a faint whiff of nuts. As if you could drink an oily nut-bread.
If you care to log on to the website of Cellier des Dauphins, you will get your first indication that what we are drinking here is a French version of a Gallo or a Sutter Home wine. That is not intended as a slur on Gallo or Sutter Home or Cellier des Dauphins, either. This is after all an AOC wine, from an Appellation d'Origine Controllee, meaning its production has at least legally met certain quality standards applied to wines in the top tier of the trade, above both "country wine" and "table wine." It's perfectly quaffable.
No, to look over Cellier's website and mentally translate what you see as Sutter Home a la Francais is simply to acknowledge and add up a few pertinent items. See the photos of huge banner ads for Cellier, at soccer stadiums and Formula One racetracks; read the announcements of production and sales figures for this brand -- and it is a brand, not a little chateau by a river producing exquisite stuff three cases at a time (10,000 hectares under cultivation, 3,600 vine growers, 60 million bottles sold annually); and then remember the attractive price of less than $7 at my local suburban liquor store. All this adds up to a wine which is obviously not some breathtakingly rare thing that I should have saved properly, and then brought out and opened only at a perfect celebratory moment. In fact I drank it with a little plate of leftover stuffed grape leaves and fried kibbeh -- a breaded deep-fried morsel of ground lamb and rice -- brought home from a new local restaurant, a place specializing in Mediterranean food. It seemed a pretty good match. In a day or two, the wine turned almost as bland as water.
What was I drinking? The Rhone valley, northern half as well as southern half, is known far more for its red wines than its whites. At the very top end of the scale, you may hunt for and find expensive and legendary reds like Hermitage and Cote Rotie (syrah based, "king and queen" of the north, as Simon Woods puts it in The Encyclopedic Atlas of Wine), and Chateauneuf du Pape, made primarily from grenache, in the south. The best white wines of the Rhone, in either direction, are made of viognier, marsanne, and roussanne -- "white Hermitage," Woods explains, "stands as one of the world's least well-known great wines, marsanne its preferred grape." Similarly, the southern Rhone produces a white Chateauneuf du Pape, made of roussanne. These are finer wines because they come simply from good, flavorful grapes, some of them, like viognier, tending to that fussiness and delicacy which drives grapegrowers mad but does produce that First Cause characteristic for magical wine, namely low yield. Apparently the members of the kingdom Plantae all think alike, whether crabgrass or orchids or vitis vinifera. Quantity does not equal quality. If you like me, dare me to grow.
That "quality white wines are hard to find [in the south] outside of Chateauneuf du Pape" means that by the time we climb down to inexpensive white wines in this area, wines not announcing New Castle of the Pope on their labels (really), we are facing uninteresting, high yield grapes -- white grenache, clairette, and bourboulenc -- and so wines that are agreeable enough but should certainly be drunk young. "Within a year of release," Mr. Woods says. My 2005 Cellier des Dauphins, of white grenache and clairette according to the information on the website, was perhaps already a bit tired in the bottle.
And about that bottle. I suspect that the good people running the Cellier, or at least running the marketing department, may be less interested in selling the wine than in selling the bottle. It is cute. I saved it and put it on a windowsill. And photos of that shape get pride of place on the website's entry page. In clear glass, filled with a rose wine, it is especially pretty. No harm in that.
