It's difficult to get a bad meal or a bad wine in a French restaurant. Every bistro offers basic Appellation Controlée wines that are inexpensive yet competent and true to type. This Côtes du Rhône is a step above those basic bistro offerings because 2007 was an excellent vintage in the Rhône. A delicious blend of 40% Grenache, 30% Syrah, and 30% Mourvèdre, this wine shows good fruit with anise, pine, and pepper overtones and nicely balanced tannins. It may not send critics on a brain-stressing search for descriptors (melted asphalt, raw meat, and the like), but darn if it isn't a tasty little thing that will nicely compliment red meats and mature cheeses. Try it with Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic. And it's hard to beat the value!

Red wines from the southern Rhône may be made from any of 13 different grape varietals, but Grenache must comprise at least 40% of the blend. Mourvèdre, Syrah, and Cinsault are also commonly used. The AOC Côtes du Rhône region stretches 200 km from Vienne in the north to Avignon and from the foothills of the Massif Central in the west to the fore-slopes of the Vaucluse and Luberon mountains. Some 171 communes have 83,839 hectares of vineyards with an average yield of 52 hectoliters/ha. The annual production of 419 million bottles comes from 5,202 growers, 875 private producers, 70 co-op wineries, and 20 merchant/producers, making CDR one of the largest single appellation regions in the world.

Wines have been produced in the region since pre-Roman times, and those from the right bank were the favorite wines of kings and the papal community in Avignon at the time of the schism. In the mid 17th century the right-bank district of Côte du Rhône had issued regulations to govern the quality of its wine, and in 1737 the king ordered that casks of wine shipped from the nearby river port of Roquemaure should be branded with the letters CDR to introduce a system of origin protection. The rules for Côte du Rhône thus formed the very early basis of today's nationwide AOC system governed by the INAO. The name was changed to Côtes du Rhône when the left-bank wines were included in the appellation some hundred years later.