Domaine L'Abbe Dine Rouge Cotes-du-Rhone 2021

L'Abbe Dine is one of our best Châteauneuf-du-Pape finds ever, and their 2021 Côtes du Rhône should be one of YOUR yummiest red discoveries this year. 

Tasting with the extremely talented Nathalie Reynaud at her winery in the Southern Rhône was one of the best visits our team has had the pleasure of – in France or maybe anywhere. We’re not at all surprised that Wine Advocate called L'Abbé Dine “an estate that seems to be turning out better and better wine every vintage.” One ingredient in the secret sauce is consultant Philippe Cambie, whom Nathalie brought in as a mentor. He’s one of the most acclaimed winemakers in the region, with over a dozen 100 point scores, and Nathalie has clearly soaked up his teachings. Her entry level 2021 Grenache–Syrah–Mourvedre – grown just outside the CdP boundary – has a nose to die for.

If you took a bubbling pan of macaroni and cheese out of the oven and sniffed the crispy herbed-breadcrumb topping right as you set it down on the table next to a blackberry–raspberry crumble, you would approximate the aromatics levitating out of this glass. There’s a moment in a Gillian Anderson movie called The Salt Path (based on Raynor Winn’s memoir) where a passerby on a trail along the English coast tells the protagonists to taste the blackberries growing nearby. “And if the mist comes right then,” he says, “laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift…”

This wine is basically those blackberries. Charming and juicy and languid, with easygliding salty-savory notes kissing the fruity, spicy, floral base. It was aged entirely in concrete, but there’s an apple wood thing here. And this is actually great slightly chilled, if you want the acid to come out a little more or it’s just horribly hot outside. Either way, this is an anytime kickback drink with both crushability and sensuous depth. Our price? Wild as blackberries!