Walls’ hidden gems: Domaine A&E Verset, Cornas

Emmanuelle Verset is the sixth generation to make wine in her family, and represents the E in Domaine A&E Verset. The A is for Alain, her father. She took over from him in 2016 at the age of 24, and is one of the few female winemakers in Cornas.

The Verset name runs deep in this part of the Rhône. You might have heard of Noël Verset (1919 – 2015), whose bottles are highly sought-after today – Noël was Alain’s uncle.

Scroll down to see Matt Walls tasting notes and scores for six Domaine A&E Verset wines

When Noël retired, his vineyards were sold to a number of local vignerons, including Thierry Allemand, Pierre Clape and Franck Balthazar. Alain also took a small portion, adding them to his existing holdings which he received from his father, Louis – Noël’s brother.

Domaine A&E Verset’s Cornas holdings are small at just 2ha, but they are located in some of the best lieux-dits of the appellation.

The vines are 60 years old on average, with parcels in lieux-dits Les Mazards and La Geynale reaching over 100 years old.

Emmanuelle has recently planted some vines in St-Péray, as well as some nearby Viognier and Syrah to be bottled as Vin de France.

Time for change

She points to several reasons why women are rare among the town’s winemakers. It’s a physically demanding job, and when vineyards pass from one generation to the next, they are typically entrusted to the head of the family – which traditionally has been a man. But times have changed.

She has never been put off by what she describes as the ‘masculine origins’ of Cornas production.

‘I always wanted to do it,’ she says, studying viticulture and vinification after school, then working for a variety of wine businesses around France.

By the time she returned to the family domaine, she had clear ideas of what needed to change, and she didn’t waste time doing it.

Jumping straight into action

Firstly, she rebuilt the crumbling dry stone walls in the vineyards and changed the way the vines are trained. Now she leaves the vines with as much vegetation as possible during the growing season.

‘It’s not pretty to look at!’ she says, but she finds the vines now suffer less in hot weather.

Next, she reduced the use of treatments in the vineyards, and now all fertilisers are organic. Her steepest vineyards are perched on a sixty-degree slope; she doesn’t have the resources to weed these by hand, so has to resort to herbicide. But she’s not far from her goal of organic viticulture.

She also built a new cellar, introduced temperature control and bought a pneumatic press.

Instead of vinifying every vintage the same way, like her father, she adapts her methods where necessary. That means more or less racking, extraction or maceration depending on the year.

In 2018, she stopped selling fruit to negociants and bottled the entire production herself. She also added an additional Cornas cuvée, Signature: a selection of the best parcels.

She hasn’t changed everything, still choosing to use whole bunches and to avoid new oak.

I have long enjoyed the wines from this estate, they were always reliably savoury, with plenty of classic Cornas grip and grunt.

Since Emmanuelle took over, however, the style has certainly changed to a more elegant one; ‘less hard, and a bit more feminine,’ she suggests.

It takes courage to make such sweeping changes at a family estate, particularly as the first female winemaker in a long line of men. But her fine, fresh 2020s vindicate her decisions.

The wines are perhaps a little more accessible than years gone by, but they are still recognisably, gloriously Cornas.

See tasting notes and scores for six Domaine A&E Verset wines:

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Cornas & St-Péray 2020: report and top-scoring wines

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