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The first verset, semantically airtight, is all Alter.

Yet if it hadn’t been for dedicated vignerons like Auguste Clape and Noël Verset, who persisted in the backbreaking labor required to tend the steep, hillside vineyards in the lean postwar years, Cornas might have been forgotten.

By Mr. Verset’s last vintage in 2006, Cornas had come to be prized around the world.

At the same dinner party at which the Noël Verset was poured, a collector opened an old half-bottle of Chartreuse, the legendary liqueur produced by Carthusian monks, who are so secretive that nobody outside the monastery is entrusted with the recipe.

The supply of Verset wines was dwindling by the time Mr. Verset died, at age 95, in 2015.