Coo-NWAZ. Coo-NAWZ. Coo-Whatever.
TASTING NOTES: “Inspired by the muscular red blends from France’s Rhone Valley, The Odyssey is made using intense mountain-grown fruit. It presents a berry fruit-driven profile laced with leather and cedar note.”
2018: 38% Grenache, 40% Mourvedre, 15% Syrah, 7% Counoise · AbV 14.8%, pH 3.40, TA .59
2019: 64% Grenache, 14% Counoise, 12% Mourvedre, 7% Syrah, 3% Cinsault · AbV 15.1%, pH 3.42, TA .54
2020: 39% Grenache, 25% Syrah, 14% Cinsault, 14% Mourvedre, 8% Counoise · AbV 14.8%, pH 3.43, TA .63
BARRELS: 13 months; 20% New French Oak
PAIRS WITH: your red meat of choice
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Counoise, the rarest grape in this blend.
Counoise is one of those words that sounds like it was invented specifically to make anglophone wine writers feel bad about themselves. Coo-NWAZ. Or is it coo-NAWZ? The French themselves seem to use it differently depending on which valley they wandered in from. It’s the kind of word that sits in your mouth like a marble — you know roughly where you want it to go, but it keeps rolling somewhere embarrassing. English has borrowed so aggressively from French for so long that we’ve developed this misplaced confidence, this breezy je ne sais quoi (see, we do it all the time) about our ability to handle whatever the language throws at us. And then Counoise shows up and exposes the whole charade.
French is full of these little landmines — words that look almost manageable until you say them out loud in front of someone who actually knows. Quinoa held the English-speaking world hostage for a decade. Worcestershire has been brutalizing tourists in England since at least the 1800s. And don’t get me started on Colonel, a word so divorced from its own spelling that linguists have written actual papers trying to explain how the “r” sound got in there (short version: the Italians and the Spanish both had a word for it, England tried to split the difference, and now we all just quietly agree to say “kernel” and move on).
But here’s the thing about Counoise — it doesn’t actually care what you call it. It shows up in Southern Rhône blends in small quantities, mostly keeping to itself, adding a little freshness, a little pepper, a little lift. It’s a supporting player, a swing vote. Here it clocks in at 7%, 14%, and 8% across the three vintages, never dominating, never grandstanding. Very confident for a grape nobody can pronounce.
