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Noël Verset, whose perseverance laboring in the steep, granite vineyards of Cornas, in the Rhône Valley of France, helped the Cornas appellation survive to be discovered by a new generation of wine lovers, died on Sept. 11 in Guilherand-Granges, France. He was 95.
During Mr. Verset’s 75-year career as a vigneron, Cornas evolved from a little-known backwater to one of the world’s most renowned regions for red wines made from the syrah grape. By the turn of the millennium, his wines, made in tiny quantities, were being celebrated as among the purest expressions of what Cornas had to offer.
His wines might very easily have never been discovered. Beginning in the late 19th century, with the arrival of phylloxera, a ravenous aphid that devastated grapevines all over Europe, Cornas faced decades of catastrophe that almost wiped out its vineyards. A solution to phylloxera was found, but many Cornas vineyards, on precipitous slopes first planted 1,000 or more years earlier, were never restored.
During Mr. Verset’s 75-year career as a vigneron, Cornas evolved from a little-known backwater to one of the world’s most renowned regions for red wines made from the syrah grape.
Then two world wars, which sandwiched the Great Depression, robbed the region of much of its agricultural work force. The labor drain continued after World War II, when many of the young men of Cornas, following a path taken all over industrializing Europe, left agriculture to work in factories. More vineyards were abandoned, deemed too difficult to work for the pittance that could be earned.
But Mr. Verset (pronounced vehr-SAY) and a few others, like Auguste Clape and Mr. Balthazar’s father, René Balthazar, persisted in their traditional arduous labor, trudging up the hillside to the vineyards as their ancestors had done. The rewards were not great.
In the 1940s and ’50s, few vignerons bottled their own wines. Most of the Cornas wines were sold by the barrel directly to local bars and restaurants, or to merchants who bought finished wines and bottled them with their own labels, often under the Côtes du Rhône appellation. Many grape growers took additional jobs to make ends meet. Mr. Verset himself worked for many years with the railroad in the nearby city of Valence.
Times remained tough into the early 1980s. Even as other northern Rhône regions like Hermitage and Côte-Rôtie were developing worldwide reputations, Cornas remained barely known outside France, its wines often described as black, rustic and powerful. At one point, in the late ’70s, the village of Cornas entertained proposals to allow developers to build housing on the vineyard land, but the opposition, including many vignerons, won out.
With that respite came new attention to the wines, and new visitors like the American importer Kermit Lynch, who sought out French wines made by producers like Mr. Verset, who shunned the labor-saving blandishments of automation and chemical farming.
“I found Noël, when I was tasting, in practically every Cornas cellar there was at the time, and I knew from the first visit that I’d found something special,” Mr. Lynch said in an interview. “He made a Cornas that was dark and intense, but with a silky texture that no one else had.”
In the 1990s and especially in the last 15 years, Mr. Verset’s wines came to be prized around the world. They were not perfect in a technical sense, but their beauty shone through in their complexity, authenticity, soulfulness and sense of history. They seemed to tell the story of Cornas in every glass.
Noël Verset was born in Cornas, France, on Dec. 4, 1919. His father, Emmanuel, was a vigneron, and young Noël worked his first vintage with his father in 1931, having left school at the age of 12, as many young French farm children did. In 1943, he married Aline Balthazar and set off to work vineyards of his own, although his father continued to help him well into his own old age.
His wife died in 1989. Mr. Verset is survived by two daughters, Sylvette and Simone.
While Mr. Verset had always bottled a small amount of wine for family consumption, it was not until the 1980s that he began to bottle a larger proportion and his name became more widely known. By the late ’90s, acolytes were making pilgrimages to Cornas to visit him.
“His later years brought forth enthusiastic visitors, often from overseas and not all male — a bit like those paying homage to B. B. King,” the British wine writer John Livingstone-Learmonth, author of “The Wines of the Northern Rhône,” said in an interview.
Like his father, Mr. Verset continued to trudge up the hillside to his vineyards when he was well into his 80s. His last vintage was 2006.
Correction: September 21, 2015