Domaine Clape

Clape is Cornas, as far as most collectors are concerned. When the appellation was selling its Syrah to négociants for blending, Auguste Clape began bottling his own — and over half a century his family's wine became the standard against which every Cornas is measured. Pierre and Olivier Clape now farm the same steep granite terraces above the village, and the cellar work has barely changed: whole clusters, old foudres, patience. The wine is Cornas at its most complete — black fruit over iron and crushed stone, austere young, magnificent at fifteen years — and the domaine's refusal to expand, modernize, or hurry anything is precisely why it holds its place. A benchmark estate in the truest sense of the word.