Rhône Wine: History of the Rhône Valley, from the Romans to the Popes

Rhône Valley wine is where French wine grew up. Strung along 150 miles of the Rhône river from Lyon to Avignon, it is really two regions in one: a steep northern canyon that makes the world’s benchmark Syrah, and a broad, sun-baked south whose Grenache blends fill more glasses than almost anywhere in France. It is also where two of wine’s biggest ideas were born — the medieval popes’ pursuit of a “new castle” wine, and the twentieth-century law, invented here, that now governs every bottle of French wine. This is the full story of Rhône wine.

Two valleys, one river

The first thing to know about the Rhône is that there are two of them, separated by a gap of almost empty country. The Northern Rhône is a narrow, dramatic canyon where vines cling to terraces so steep they must be worked by hand; here a single grape, Syrah, makes tiny quantities of some of the most profound red wine on earth, and Viognier makes one of its most perfumed whites. The Southern Rhône is a different world: wide, hot, and open, where the wine is almost always a blend led by Grenache, and where production is vast. Binding them is the river — and the mistral, the cold, violent wind that howls down the valley, drying the grapes, warding off rot, and, the locals say, driving people a little mad.¹

The Romans and the roasted slope

The Rhône was making famous wine when most of France was still forest. Around the Roman town of Vienne, the Gaulish Allobroges grew a vine that produced a dark, naturally resinous wine prized in Rome itself — Roman writers such as Pliny and Martial name-check it admiringly in the first century. That heritage survives in the very name of Côte-Rôtie, the “roasted slope,” whose south-facing terraces above the river have been catching the sun for two thousand years. The Rhône’s reputation, in other words, is not a modern invention; it is one of the oldest continuously prized vineyards in the world.¹²

Syrah is French, not Persian

For centuries a romantic story insisted that Syrah — the Rhône’s noble red grape, known as Shiraz in the New World — had been carried to France from the Persian city of Shiraz, or from Syracuse, by a returning crusader. It is a wonderful tale, and completely false. In 1998, DNA testing settled it: Syrah is the natural offspring of two obscure grapes, Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche, both native to the French Alps and Ardèche just west of the northern Rhône. The world’s great “exotic” red is, genetically, a local from the next valley over.³

Syrah did not travel the Silk Road from Persia. It was born a few miles from where it still grows best.

The hermit on the hill

Across the river from the Roman slopes rises the most storied single hill in the Rhône: Hermitage. Its name comes from a legend as good as any in wine. In the early 1200s, so the story goes, a battered crusader knight named Gaspard de Stérimberg came home from the wars, asked the queen for a scrap of land, and withdrew to the top of this hill to live out his days as a hermit — planting vines between his prayers. The wine of “l’Hermitage” became so revered that by the 1700s and 1800s it was among the most expensive in the world, and was even shipped to Bordeaux to strengthen its greatest châteaux in weak years — a practice quietly known as hermitageé.⁴

The popes’ new castle

The Rhône’s most famous name was made by the Catholic Church. When the papacy decamped from Rome to Avignon from 1309 to 1377, the popes needed wine, and they took a serious interest in the vineyards just north of the city. Pope John XXII built a summer palace there — the “new castle of the pope,” Châteauneuf-du-Pape — and the name stuck to the wine. The place is defined by its soil: a blanket of large, smooth stones called galets roulés, rolled round by an ancient glacier, which soak up the day’s heat and radiate it back to the vines all night. And it is famously permissive about grapes, allowing a blend of up to thirteen different varieties — Grenache at its heart — in a single wine.⁵

Baron Le Roy and the birth of the appellation

Châteauneuf-du-Pape gave the world far more than a wine: it gave it the modern idea of a protected wine region. In the 1920s the area was plagued by fraud, with inferior wine sold under its name. A local grower, the lawyer and former fighter pilot Baron Pierre Le Roy de Boiseaumarié, fought back by drafting strict rules in 1923 — defining the exact boundaries, the permitted grapes, and the methods that a wine had to meet to call itself Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Those rules became the template for the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée system created in 1936, which in turn became the model for protected-origin food and wine laws all over the world. Every “AOC,” “DOC” and “AVA” on a wine label today traces back to a Rhône vineyard.⁶

The law against flying saucers

Châteauneuf-du-Pape also holds one of the strangest laws in wine. In 1954, at the height of a nationwide flying-saucer panic, the village mayor, Lucien Jeune, issued a municipal decree forbidding “the overflight, landing and take-off of aircraft known as flying saucers or flying cigars” anywhere in the commune — and ordered that any which landed be impounded on the spot. It was half joke, half shrewd publicity, and it worked: seventy years on, the ordinance is still on the books, and successive mayors have pointedly refused to repeal it. No flying saucer, the village likes to note, has yet dared to test it.⁷

Tavel, the rosé of kings

One southern Rhône appellation makes nothing but pink wine, and makes it seriously: Tavel, long held to be France’s greatest rosé. It was a favourite of the Avignon popes and, later, of Louis XIV — a reminder that in the Rhône even the rosé arrives with centuries of history behind it.⁸

From backwater to benchmark: the modern Rhône

For much of the twentieth century the Rhône was underrated — the north’s steep terraces were being abandoned as too hard to farm, and the south was a sea of anonymous bulk red. Two forces turned that around. In the north, the house of Guigal began bottling single terraced vineyards of Côte-Rôtie — La Mouline, La Landonne and La Turque, the famous “La La’s” — that critics scored perfectly and collectors chased to record prices, proving Syrah from these slopes could stand beside any wine on earth. In the south, the Grenache-Syrah-Mourvèdre blend perfected at Châteauneuf became a template copied around the globe, from Australia to California’s “Rhône Rangers.” The valley that had quietly invented so much of wine’s history had, once again, set the standard.⁹

Every Rhône story on This Day in Wine History

Go deeper on the popes, the hermit, and the grape that fooled the world:

• Châteauneuf-du-Pape: the pope’s wine and France’s first AOC
• The Northern Rhône: the home of Syrah
• Shiraz and Iran: the myth of Syrah’s Persian origins
• The castle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape
• Wine and the papacy

See all Rhône articles →

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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French Wine: A History

Rod Phillips

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Sources & further reading

1. Rod Phillips, French Wine: A History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016) — on Roman Vienne, the two Rhônes, and the mistral. University of California Press. ↩
2. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding, eds., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Rhône” and “Côte Rôtie.” Oxford Reference. ↩
3. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Syrah” — on the DNA parentage (Dureza × Mondeuse Blanche) established by ampelographic and DNA research. ↩
4. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Hermitage.” ↩
5. Phillips, French Wine: A History (UC Press, 2016), and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Châteauneuf-du-Pape” — on the Avignon papacy, the galets, and the thirteen grape varieties. ↩
6. Phillips, French Wine: A History (UC Press, 2016), and The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “appellation contrôlée” — on Baron Le Roy and the origins of the AOC system. ↩
7. “Medieval town in south of France upholds ban on UFOs,” The Local (France), on the 1954 municipal decree of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. thelocal.fr. ↩
8. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Tavel.” ↩
9. The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (OUP, 2015), s.v. “Guigal” and “Côte Rôtie” — on the single-vineyard revival and the global spread of Rhône blends. ↩