Notes from a tasting at Vinoteca 26/09/2008
2007 Grecanico, Caruso & Minini
This wine from the Marsala area of Sicily is remarkably smart for the price. The nose is warm, suggestive of orange-blossom, dry honey and marzipan, and perhaps roast apricots, the palate is beautifully textured, vinous and round with good length and a slightly bitter peach kernel finish. I’m checking out my squid options, but could transfer into grilled mackerel.
2006 Jasnieres Kharakter, Domaine le Briseau
Why do I love Chenin so much? This is why… Seductive pollen aromas draw you into the glass, the mouth is taffeta with the smoothness of peeled pears rolled in wild honey and cinnamon. The finish is understated, deliciously natural with not a molecule out of place. Put your hard earned into pork bellies and rev up a glass of this cool character.
2005 Sancerre Cuvee Jadis, Henri Bourgeois
Our favourite Sauvignon Rose (or Gris ) from the durned Kimmeridgean-clay slopes sheering up from Chavignol. The wine is so harmonious, pink grapefruit and passionfruit flavours abound, held in check by fine minerality. A pleasure to drink now but would age very well. Shares in goat’s cheese are rising.
2007 Pacherenc sec vieilles vignes, Domaine Berthoumieu
This wine has never shown better than this. I can only refer to a previous note here: “Punchy with acidity and bags of orchard fruit flavour. This is from old vines (up to 50 years old) half fermented in tank and half in new oak. Batonnage is for 8 months. This is a big, generous wine: quite golden with a nose of orchard fruits burnished by the sun, conjuring half misty-half sunny early autumn afternoons. The wine slides around the tongue and fills the mouth with pear william and yellow plum flavours, ginger and angelica (tastes as if there is quite a lot of lees contact) and is rounded off by a lambent vanillin texture. You’d want food - grilled salmon with fennel or some juicy scallops perhaps.”
2006 Rully 1 er cru Chapitre, Domaine de Belleville
Gobsmackingly good Burgundy – I had to check the label to see if I wasn’t drinking a Cote de Beaune from a serious village. Golden colour, waves of roasted hazelnuts and almonds and pain grillé, good attack on the palate with the spicy oak well-contained easing into apple and lemon finish with recurrent reminders of the hazelnuts. A winner. Drank it eight hours later and it had developed a more mineral component – serious backbone here. This Belleville will be having several rendez-vous with my cellar, Trade in luxury fish or shellfish - lobster or turbot.
2007 Viognier-Roussanne, Ardeche, Romaneax-Destezet
I like the fact that the Viognier only gives a delicate aromatic steer to the wine. To me this is all about the Roussanne which bequeaths amazing smells of warm hay and roasted herbs; the Viognier weighs in with some honeysuckle (none of those confected aromas here) and, as the wine develops in the glass, the various components meld seamlessly. This would be my white meditation wine; it reminds of great white Chateauneuf-du-Pape which seems to put on textural and textual layers the longer you allow it to find its aromatic equilibrium. Eating futures are in monkfish and turbot again.
2004 Vino Bianco, Trebez, Dario Princic
Put your preconceptions into neutral and your taste buds into overdrive and experience a wine with minerality, relentless focus, bitter bite and guts. Princic’s wines have the same feel as those of La Stoppa and Valentini: totally unfiltered, they taste of the earth, of rock salts and bitter stony fruits, in other words edgily natural. The Trebez (Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay and Sauvignon) is amber with aromas of wild yeasts, and grapeskin. It is almost prickly on the tongue gripping the gums with (white) pepper tannins, grapefruit zest and dry minerality and wakey-wakey acidity. Fantastically uncompromising, an evangelical hymn to purity. I’d risk this wine with a veal chop or something completely different like a chunky fish stew.