2020 | Domaine Barge | Cote Rotie Le Combard

Lastly, the 2020 Côte Rôtie Coeur De Combard is darker and more black-fruited, with plenty of black cherry, licorice, roasted herbs, and iron aromatics. These carry to a medium to full-bodied Côte Rôtie offering silky tannins, a layered, ripe mouthfeel, terrific balance, and outstanding length.

Producer Information

Born to a family who’d been growing grapes since 1860, Jules Barge became the first in Côte Rôtie to sell domaine-bottled wines in 1929. His long career ended in the early 1970s, when he handed the baton to his son Pierre. As was typical for the times, both men made only one classique Côte Rôtie—a mixture of wine from Côte Brune and Côte Blonde, but with an emphasis on the former. But in the 1979, Gilles Barge joined his father, inspired by the commercial success of his father’s great 1976 Côte Rôtie. He had already attended enology school—the first son of Ampuis to do so—and he had worked for a wine merchant in Ampuis for a few years. It was the perfect preparation for a skillful innovator: a young man steeped in his family’s traditional ideals, but with technical training and the experience of the marketplace. From the time he joined his father until he took over in 1994, Gilles had the time (and intelligence) to chart the domaine’s future. He saw it as essentially traditionalist, with a heavy emphasis on whole-cluster fermentation and the use of mostly neutral, old barrels, especially demi-muids, for aging. But Gilles has also saw opportunities to improve on the Old School’s ways. He reduced the use of sulfur (long before it became fashionable to do so) and he eliminated fining and filtration. He even conceived a way to continue practicing classic submerged cap fermentation in a temperature-controlled tank And perhaps most importantly, he reorganized the domaine’s wines, creating two highly expressive and unique single-vineyard cuvées, plus a blended wine that in itself is a masterpiece of typicity. Today, nearly 90 years after it began to sell its own domaine-bottled wines, Barge is one of Côte Rôtie’s standard-bearers of traditionalism, with Gilles’ son, Julien, next in line to continue his family’s important legacy.

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