Radiant Rhône Red - Wine & Spirits Magazine

Wine of the Week

Radiant Rhône Red

by Tara Q. Thomas • March 14, 2022

Saint Cosme’s medieval chapel (Courtesy of Saint Cosme)

While Louis Barruol is best known for the wines he grows at Château de St-Cosme, the family’s winery in Gigondas, he’s also a skilled négociant, bottling wines from purchased fruit under the label “Saint Cosme.” He’s made his St-Joseph from the same source for 20 vintages, the vines growing in the granite soils of Malleval, along the border where St-Joseph meets Condrieu. The cooler temps at this northern end of the appellation were a bonus in the hot 2019 vintage, allowing the wine to grow ripe without losing its acid backbone. The result is a bright and invigorating red with a bone-warming radiance. Vinified with ambient yeasts in cement, and aged for a year in mostly used barrels, it feels pure and unfettered, with a fresh crunch to the fruit and effusive florals that Barruol finds common to sérine, an old, small-berried selection of syrah. Underneath, darker notes of damp earth and stone give the wine a fullness and firmness that bodes well for this wine’s future, though it’s hard to resist at the moment.

Winebow, NY

95

Saint Cosme 2019 St-Joseph

$40

Where To Buy

Every week, our editors highlight a wine that intrigued them in our blind panel tastings, expanding on their tasting note in this space. These are entirely editorial choices; there are no paid placements. Subscribers can also access the original tasting note by searching h ere.

Tara Q. Thomas

is W&S’s editor at large and covers the wines of the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe for the magazine.

This story appears in the print issue of December 2021.
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TAGS Northern Rhone Wine of the Week

David Paradela
Associate Editor

David joined Wine & Spirits in 2021 after immersing himself in the world of wine at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally from Boston, he graduated from Boston University with a degree in English and completed a master’s degree in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College in 2021. Prior to working at the magazine, he served as an editor and staff writer for the music blog Sound of Boston and worked in scientific publishing. Aside from wine, he loves basketball, arguing about Taylor Swift’s best album, and everything Greta Gerwig touches.

Corey Warren
Tastings Editor

Corey Warren moved to New York in 2015—fifteen years too late to join The Strokes—after earning a degree at Cornell in Comparative Literature. He started polishing glasses at Betony and threw himself into the restaurant world. Later, while a captain at Aquavit, he began working part time in the Wine & Spirits tasting department. Now, in addition to running tastings, he serves as critic for the wines of the Loire, Southern France, Argentina and South Africa. Corey likes almost anything bubbly, from Miller High Life, the Champagne of beers, to Champagne, the Champagne of Champagne, but he’ll drink anything once, and loves finding unique wines.

Tara Q. Thomas
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Since Tara Q. Thomas joined Wine & Spirits in 1997, she’s traveled the wine world from Argentina to Australia. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, with more than 20 years of experience in the food and wine world, Tara puts her culinary knowledge to use as W&S’s resident food critic, and is the critic for the wines of Austria, Germany, Eastern Europe, Argentina, and the Mediterranean. She’s particularly enthusiastic about the wines of Greece, where she once lived and cooked. Outside of W&S, Tara has authored two books, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine Basics and The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Wine; contributed to the Oxford Companion to Cheese as well as Oxford’s forthcoming volume on spirits; and writes a wine column for Culture: The Word on Cheese.

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Patricio Tapia
Senior Correspondent

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, Patricio Tapia attended Bordeaux University in France, where he studied for a diploma in wine tasting and winemaking. Since then, he has visited wine regions around the world and authored several books, including his annual Descorchados, a Chilean wine guide; The Wines of Colchagua Valley; TodoVino and Wines for Great Occasions. Tapia is also the South American correspondent for The Oxford Companion to Wine, The World Atlas of Wine and Oz Clarke’s Pocket Wine Book. For the past three years, he’s been a host on the El Gourmet channel in South America. At Wine & Spirits, Tapia is the critic for the wines of Argentina, Chile and Spain, and regularly contributes articles on these regions.