The "roasted slope" rises almost sheer above the Rhône at Ampuis, opposite Roman Vienne, whose vinum picatum Pliny already praised in the first century. The terraces are so steep that everything — grapes, soil washed down by storms, the vigneron himself — moves by hand and by back. Legend names the two great hillsides, Brune and Blonde, for a lord's two daughters, one dark, one fair.
Syrah is co-fermented with a breath of viognier — the appellation permits up to a fifth, practice uses far less — which fixes the colour and gives the perfume: violets, black olive, smoked meat. Nearly abandoned in the 1970s, when the terraces barely repaid their labour, Côte-Rôtie was resurrected within a generation to world fame.