Spicy dark fruit nose with some sweet black cherry. Full in the mouth with good concentration and pervasive fine tannins. Nice tang and chewiness. Medium body. Strong finish with acid right in balance with rich fruit. Could be more complex but a very solid wine. 89.
I’m back from a week of vacation and boy did it make me appreciate my wine glasses. We rented a house in Rehoboth Beach and it came with small size wine glasses not real stemware so last night was my first night back with my oversized Spiegelau Burgundy stems and it crystallized for me what I’d been missing. We drank a lot of wine on vacation with some good and some bad but I quickly gave up on the idea of writing blog posts from the beach because I just couldn’t taste seriously out of those glasses. Everything was muted and jumbled together. My judgments ended up just being about feel, weight, and an overall flavor of the wine.
Last night was like I could taste again. I felt precise in my ability to identify aromas, play with the wine to bring it out more (despite my efforts to try to aggressively swirl in tiny glasses), and to watch the wine develop with air.
This Cotes Du Rhone wine is great value and you can buy it for $13 now from Garagiste (comment below and I’ll forward you the offer email). 2009 is a big time vintage in the Rhone and Xavier Vignon has made a full line from low end to high end. This is his lowest end wine but it doesn’t taste like that at all. It is balanced just right with acid tang that is so well integrated with the dark fruit that I had to think about acid before I realized it was there. It is drinking really well right now but the noticeable tannins also make me think it could improve from here.
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