In an effort to foster such a discussion, Mr. Berk recently organized a small dinner in New York to explore the various styles of Côte-Rôtie. In addition to him and several others from Rare Wine, the guests included Stephen Grant, who collects Rhône wines; Peter Sisseck, the proprietor of Dominio de Pingus in Ribera del Duero, whose wines are imported by Rare Wine and who happened to be passing through New York — and me. The wines were selected by Mr. Berk to represent the different styles, and included several from Gentaz-Dervieux.

Côte-Rôtie is famously translated as “roasted slope,” implying hot weather. In fact, Côte-Rôtie, a tiny appellation less than 25 miles south of Lyon near the town of Ampuis, may represent the northernmost cool-climate limit for growing the syrah grape. It is dominated by a network of ancient terraced granite vineyards on an impossibly steep slope facing south into the sun, which bathes the vines in light more than in heat.

While the wines of the northern Rhône are esteemed today, 30 years ago they were hardly known. Kermit Lynch, the pioneering importer who first brought the wines of Gentaz-Dervieux to the United States, recalled his first visits to the region in the late 1970s. “It was really about as rustic as it got, the northern Rhône, just totally lost in time,” he told me last week. “The American public had never really heard about it, and even in France the reputation was very local.”

As the wines became better known, Côte-Rôtie was naturally compared with Hermitage, its northern Rhône sibling just to the south. In the gender-specific thinking of this Romance-language culture, the more burly, powerful Hermitage was described as masculine, while the more aromatic, delicate Côte-Rôtie was called feminine.

Enhancing this impression was that, while red wines of the northern Rhône are otherwise 100 percent syrah, Côte-Rôtie alone is permitted to blend in small amounts of viognier, which can lighten and perfume the wine.

At our dinner, we tasted 16 wines. Starting with six from the 2006 vintage, we went backward in time through two ’95s, two ’88s, two ’83s, two ’82s, an ’80 and a ’78. The idea was to include both traditional and modern interpretations, but it quickly became clear that this dichotomy was too simple, that an entire range of styles was before us.