The second week of June 2026 had been entirely consumed by a demanding conference in Deauville. By Friday evening, the schedule had finally cleared — no more structured networking, no more client dinners to manage. It was just our internal team, and since I had only joined the company two months prior, this was the first real opportunity to sit down with everyone without the pressure of an agenda. We booked a table at Les Planches, a restaurant set back from the beach with a terrace that catches the evening light perfectly. As the sun began to set over La Manche, throwing a long golden glare across the water, the mood at the table shifted from professional exhaustion to genuine camaraderie. The week was finally over.
When the wine list came around, I was looking for something with enough structure to anchor a serious dinner, but not something so heavy that it would demand silence. I landed on the 2021 Côte-Rôtie "Les Côtes" from Domaine Julien Barge. Côte-Rôtie — literally "the roasted slope" — is the northernmost red wine appellation of the Rhône Valley, famous for its impossibly steep, terraced vineyards that drop down toward the river near the town of Ampuis. The appellation is built entirely on Syrah, though the rules uniquely allow for a small percentage of the white grape Viognier to be co-fermented with it — a practice that lifts the aromatics, stabilises the colour, and adds a subtle floral dimension to the structure. This bottle was exactly what the evening required.
The Barge family has been farming in Ampuis — a town identified on the label by the postal code 69420, a numeric detail that confirms the estate is located at the very epicenter of the appellation — since 1860, and Julien’s great-grandfather, Jules Barge, was among the very first in the region to bottle his own estate wine in 1929, rather than selling it off in bulk to négociants. Julien took over from his father Gilles recently and immediately began pushing the estate in a stricter, lower-intervention direction: organic certification, whole-bunch fermentation — retaining the grape stems during vinification for added grip — and a drastic reduction in sulphur. This shift caused a significant family rift in 2020, resulting in the domaine losing access to a prestigious parcel on the Côte-Brune. What remains for this "Les Côtes" cuvée is a blend drawn almost entirely from the lighter, gneiss-based soils of the Côte-Blonde sector — terroirs that traditionally yield the most perfumed, ethereal, and elegant expressions of the appellation. The stylistic shift was costly, but entirely deliberate.
The 2021 vintage played perfectly into this leaner approach. After a run of hot, solar years in the Northern Rhône, 2021 was notably cooler and more challenging, forcing a later harvest and naturally restraining sugar levels. The result is a wine with stricter acidity, lower alcohol, and a distinctly savoury profile driven by white pepper, smoked lardon, and graphite. In the cellar, Barge matures this wine through an extended élevage — typically around 24 to 28 months — in 600-litre demi-muids, rather than the more common small barriques. This maturation regime allows the wine to polymerise its tannins and breathe without picking up intrusive oak flavours, preserving the nervous tension of the cooler vintage. It drank more like a muscular Premier Cru Burgundy than a typical Rhône powerhouse.
I had ordered the green asparagus with capers and pine nuts to start. Asparagus is famously antagonistic to red wine — it contains asparagusic acid and sulphur compounds that routinely strip the fruit out of a red, making it taste metallic and harsh. Because I knew the risk, I simply let the wine sit in the glass while I finished the starter. I love asparagus too much to pass it up, but there was no reason to ruin a good Côte-Rôtie over it. I waited for the steak to take my first sip.
When the main course arrived — a thick rib steak cooked à la plancha with a sharp salsa verde — the pairing clicked into place entirely. The rendered fat of the beef absorbed the fine-grained tannins of the Syrah. The wine’s vibrant acidity and the herbal bite of the salsa verde mirrored each other perfectly.
After the meal, we took a short stroll down to the water to see the actual planches that give the restaurant its name. Deauville’s famous wooden boardwalk was laid down in 1923, designed by Parisian architect Charles Adda. It was built specifically so the high-society women of the Années Folles — the Roaring Twenties — could walk the beachfront without ruining their dresses in the sand. But the boardwalk was just the frontage for Adda’s masterpiece: the Pompeian Baths. This sprawling Art Deco complex of mosaic pools and colonnades featured 450 bathing cabins that completely redefined French seaside culture. Renting a cabin — by the day, the month, or the season — was no longer just about changing clothes for a therapeutic saltwater dip. It was a fierce status symbol, a place to hold court and socialize after arriving from Paris on the luxury Train Bleu. Today, the wooden railings separating those same cabins bear the stencilled names of Hollywood actors who have attended the local film festival since the 1970s. The 2021 "Les Côtes" is a quiet rebuke to the idea that the Northern Rhône must always deliver overwhelming power, much like the boardwalk is a reminder that the coast was once built for elegance rather than speed. Sometimes, leaving the heavy artillery in the cellar is the correct decision.
Pairs well with
