Browse Tag

cabernet franc

To Grand Mont’s house we go

Druet 1997 Bourgueil “Cuvée Grand Mont” (Loire) – Beautiful. Rounded green-black berries, tarred and then ground into fine mineral dust. Satiny, but with a rough country dusting in the interstitials. It’s hard to really express all that’s going on in this wine, but there’s a lot, and not all of it is televised; sitting down and reading the preface, footnotes, and even the index is also required. Long, gorgeous, absolutely at peak. (9/11)

Stolen Christmas

C&P Breton 2009 Bourgueil “Trinch!” (Loire) – Scratchy wild berries and herb, all a-stew, brightened by acidity and sharpened by a quinine-like bitterness. Its structure creates an appealing gluggability that empties the bottle in awfully short order. (7/11)

A little overheated

Petit 2006 Bourgueil “Cuvée Ronsard Sélection Particulière” (Loire) – Completely baked. (Norwich Wine & Spirits was the store, Neal Rosenthal the importer, any other middlepersons unknown) (7/11)

A carefully-butchered row

Filliatreau 2001 Saumur-Champigny “La Grande Vignolle” (Loire) – Brittle. Dark plum, black soil, and then a MIRV-ing explosion of razor wire. Oddly, despite the bloody retribution the wine apparently seeks to enact, I like this wine. But it needs something alongside that can tame both slashing acidity and cutting tannin. (7/11)

How, how, how, how

B. Baudry 2009 Chinon Les Granges (Loire) – Lucious spiced rock, loamy earth, misted herb, and fruit dust. That complex, and yet simpler than that as well. I could quite happily drink this in open-spigot quantities. (6/11)

Where’s Grandpont?

C&P Breton Bourgueil 1997 Grandmont (Loire) – The fruit hangs on, still, and what’s most notable about it isn’t its presence, but its largely primary nature. There’s not much of it anymore, but its keening hum is still as rounded and dark-berried as it was in this wine’s youth. Mostly, though, the fruit’s fade has slowly revealed the post-burn minerality and fine-ground herbs within. As befits a ’97, it’s all a bit forward and upfront; more “classic’ vintages show less fruit but more temporal balance and persistence. (6/11)

Chets nous

C&P Breton 1996 Bourgueil Galichets (Loire) – Dusty, finely-honed structure. Graphite powder clouds. Black, sullen strips of flesh-torn berries. Still solid, though the tannin is getting a bit abrasive, and I think most folks will want to think about drinking this. Optimistic necrophiles can wait; the fruit’s not yet mature. (5/11)

Sénéchal we dance?

C&P Breton 1997 Bourgueil Clos Sénéchal (Loire) – A spice blend of dark grey minerals and ground-up herbs, more tactile and powdery than liquid at this stage. There’s a dark, quinine-like note to what little liquidity there is. I don’t know if this is quite as appealing as it was a few years ago, but I’d call it fully mature at this point, though I suppose in no real danger of collapsing; what’s left seems pretty sturdy. (5/11)

Everything Olga is new again

Olga Raffault 1995 Chinon Les Picasses (Loire) – Singing. It’s a rustic country tune, but it’s in full-throated voice at the moment. Distilled-down concentrate of old autumns, full of the memory of blackberries passed, with a crackled structure. Or, to employ a similarly stretchy metaphor, like drinking bichromatic stained glass. (2/11)

Picasses…no, pick them

C&P Breton 1997 Chinon Les Picasses (Loire) – Expansive. It throws down a game board – a virtual one, I think, because it’s expansive – of soil, vegetation, and fungal growth, then starts layering it with sprinkler-sprays of matured dark plums, black truffles, earthdust, thyme broth…and then those repeat in random order. Lush with flavor but not in texture, its elbows and knees only add to the overall appeal. Really, really good. Could it hold, or even develop, longer? Yes, I think so. But it’s very enticing now. (2/11)