Vincent Paris, Cornas La Geynale, 2015

This is the apex bottle in Vincent Paris's Cornas lineup, and it carries a real piece of Northern Rhône history. Paris is the nephew of Robert Michel, the old-guard Cornas master who retired after the 2006 vintage and left his nephew a single south-facing parcel inside the Reynard climat planted to roughly 100-year-old Syrah vines: La Geynale. The 2015 vintage in the Northern Rhône was a landmark, deeply concentrated and structured, and many critics consider this the greatest Geynale Paris has yet made. A decade on, the wine is now in its drinking window with another ten to fifteen years of upside ahead. Cornas of the new generation: serious, fresh, energetic, capable of nuance and elegance, and absolutely true to one of the appellation's great old-vine sites.