Appellation · France
Cornas
A small suntrap of an appellation making the darkest, most uncompromising Syrah in the Rhône — red wine only, no white, no blending.
Full-bodied, opaque, dry red with blackberry, black olive, tar and smoke over dense tannin. Uncompromising when young; give it eight to fifteen years.
About Cornas
Cornas is about 150 hectares in an amphitheatre of granite terraces sheltered from the mistral. It is the warmest and most sheltered site in the Northern Rhône, and the wines show it.
Cornas is 100% Syrah with no white grapes permitted at all — alone among the Northern Rhône reds. The wines are correspondingly dense, dark and tannic, historically to the point of severity: young Cornas from a traditional producer can be genuinely forbidding.
A generational shift since the 1990s has brought earlier picking, gentler extraction and destemming to a proportion of producers, and modern Cornas is more approachable without having lost its weight. The stylistic argument between the two camps is unusually open.
It remains, per bottle, the best value among the Northern Rhône’s great appellations.
What the name means
- Legal name
- Cornas AOC
- Type
- Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée / Protégée (AOC / AOP)
- Set by
- INAO
- Recognised
- 1938
- Regulates
- Origin, plus grape varieties, maximum yields, minimum ageing.
The delimited area, permitted varieties, maximum yields, minimum alcohol, pruning and training methods, and in many cases minimum ageing. Administered by INAO.
Red wine only, from 100% Syrah. No white grapes are permitted, which distinguishes it from every other Northern Rhône red appellation.
Grapes
Wines from here
Climate
- Latitude
- 45.0° N
- Temperature
- Warm
- Drought risk
- Moderate
A natural amphitheatre of south-facing granite sheltered from the north wind. It is the warmest site in the Northern Rhône and ripens up to two weeks ahead of Côte-Rôtie — the name is thought to derive from an Occitan word for burnt earth.
Cornas has a warm climate with continental influence, at roughly 44.96° of latitude. Drought is a periodic constraint. A natural amphitheatre of south-facing granite sheltered from the north wind. It is the warmest site in the Northern Rhône and ripens up to two weeks ahead of Côte-Rôtie — the name is thought to derive from an Occitan word for burnt earth.
Vintage variation
Vintage matters somewhat
A dependable climate with occasional difficult years. Most vintages are broadly similar; the exceptions are the ones worth knowing about.
- Latitude. At around 45°, ripeness is usually reached but is not a formality.
- Continental influence. No large body of water to buffer the extremes. Continental places have hotter summers, colder winters and sharper frost risk, all of which widen the gap between years.
Derived from the climate above, not from anyone’s view of particular years. Why there are no vintage scores here.
These are influences on how a wine turns out, not determinants of it. Picking date, yield, vine age and every winemaking decision sit between the climate and the glass.
Soil and geology
- Underlying geology
- Granite, weathering to a sandy gore
- Soils
- Decomposed granite on steep terraces
- Drainage
- Free-draining
- Water holding
- Low
- Heat retention
- High
What it does to the vine. Steep, terraced, south-facing granite in a sheltered bowl. The combination gives the fullest ripening in the Northern Rhône, and the thin sandy soil keeps yields naturally low.
WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.
Rules worth knowing
Confirmed in the EU register
Cornas is registered as a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), file number PDO-FR-A0697, protected at EU level since 1973.
Article 107 of Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013
Specification published: Official Journal C, C/2025/439, 15.1.2025, · Official Journal
Only the rules that change what to expect in the glass or on the label. WineHQ does not reproduce production specifications, and each entry carries the date it was last checked because appellation rules change.
The designation is confirmed above. WineHQ has not read this appellation’s production specification, so it publishes no yields, ageing minima or permitted-variety lists for it — those come from the document linked above, not from a summary of it.
What to eat, and how to serve it
Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.
Northern Rhône Syrah
Serve at 16–18°C (cool room temperature).
Try with steak au poivre, steak or venison and game.
Where to go next
Places worth trying if you like this one — neighbours, rivals, and the obvious step across.
- Hermitage — A single south-facing granite hill above Tain, and for two centuries the most expensive red wine in France after the Bordeaux first growths.
- Saint-Péray — The Northern Rhône’s only sparkling wine appellation, and a small source of increasingly serious still Marsanne.
- Saint-Joseph — A fifty-kilometre ribbon of vineyard down the right bank, ranging from serious hillside Syrah to very ordinary flatland wine.
Approximate centroid: 44.96°, 4.85°. WineHQ stores coordinates only where it has them, and does not estimate boundaries it has not sourced.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité (INAO) — INAO, France
- Vins du Rhône (Inter Rhône) — Inter Rhône