New content! Now with more Clos Rougeard!

Good friends Noel and Marie, with out of town guests Ben and Brian, joined me and a couple of others for an al fresco bacchanal at Vin Rouge. We supplemented bottles we brought with selections off of the excellent list.

We started with a plateau d’huitres. The perfect foil?

2010 Domaine de la Pépière Clos des Briords

From magnum. Piquant, vibrant and lithe, just as we’ve all come to love and expect from Marc Ollivier. I hope that we all appreciate the excellence that Marc provides at such a reasonable price. You could drink your bodyweight in this and still want more.

With assorted salads and appetizers.

2010 Jean Manciat Mâcon Charnay Franclieu

I have been drinking a ton of Manciat lately. It’s an interesting producer that often gets lost in the LDM portfolio behind Roally and Thevenet. The wines are different in style and from a different area than those wines, so liking one isn’t at the expense of the other. The Manciat wines rarely seem to be botrytis marked. They are balanced, refined and utterly delicious expressions of chardonnay. This magnum was a perfect complement to a warm, but not hot, southern evening. Yellow and pitted fruits with some notes of honeysuckle and flowers. Nice sense of grip from acidity. If you have the willpower, and I don’t, you could certainly cellar this for a few years and be rewarded.

Ben had never had a Rougeard Le Bourg outside of a trade tasting; that is, with some bottle age. 

1997 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny Le Bourg

This is more than an ordinary bottle for me. This wine, I purchased from David Lillie when he was still at Garnet. David had introduced me to the excellence of Baudry, Breton and others and also Rougeard. I was a graduate student at the time so it was hard to buy wines like this. David would always hold me a bottle or two of Bourg and Poyeaux for me to purchase when I could. Obviously, he didn’t have to do that, but it shows the kind of guy that we all know and respect. This was my last bottle of 1997 and it was a pleasure to drink. The palate is resolved, more or less. There are a bit of tannins that add grit and bite, but the tactile experience is mostly silky. There are tertiary aromas of tobacco, cocoa, earth interwoven with spice, cocoa and dried red fruits. I think it is a bit of a tweener at 15 years old. It isn’t quite a mature wine with nothing but savory aromas and bottle sweetness, but it isn’t in that first great peak of a wine where it still has fruit but its structure has basically found its adult form. Still, this is picking nits from a great wine from a great terroir.

2003 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny Le Bourg

To keep going with the #RougeardMania, we ordered this off of the list and had it decanted. I’ve had great experiences with the 2003 Le Bourg, but this was the best yet. Almost terrifying in its magnificence. 

1998 Thierry Allemand Cornas Reynard

Fantastic bottle. Aromatically complex, fleshy, grippy and seamless on the palate. Fruit, earth, and minerals dancing with cohesion. Really triumphant syrah. If it doesn't have the wildness of Verset, it reeks of class and breed. I think this still has some development to go, but it is in a lovely spot now.

2004 Baudry Chinon La Croix Boissée

This was really hard to get my head around as it seemed shut down and a bit reduced. I get hints of the pure sour cherry mashed with herbs, tobacco and rocks, but it really is not expressive. The structure is still dominant with the tannin squaring off like the Maginot line, impressively engineered, but bound to give at some point. Croix Boissée can be such a tricky wine to catch in the right place and I haven't yet mastered that art, despite all my efforts. Since we've had enough wine and I am not really able to understand it, I returned the wine to its bottle and re-corked to try later.

What I do for my friends

Went to dinner at Rue Cler with Matt. Brought his two favorite wines since he is leaving for a month.

2002 Azienda Agricola Stanislao Radikon Jakot Venezia Giulia IGT
A deeper color than when I last had it. After some air, the nose really opens up. This is my favorite of the Radikon wines and while this bottle doesn’t have the intensity of past bottles, the 2002 vintage was probably not a great candidate for aging. Not that these bottles should be aged in any event.

2003 Clos Rougeard (Foucault) Saumur-Champigny Le Bourg
This showed a lot of wood on first opening. After about an hour in the carafe, the wood started to become more of a complement, with notes of spice, rather than a focal point. This has excellent texture with a nose and palate that is pure Bourg. This wine, along with the 1997 of this and Breton’s Perrières of the same vintages, is the wine that made me question perceived wisdom about vintages and to start asking questions about how the wine can be so remarkable and fresh in such a hot and challenging year like 2003. What this comes down to is not so much ambient temperature, but soil depth. There is very little topsoil at Bourg and underneath is pure rock, according to Nady Foucault. The same is true of Perrières, according to Pierre Breton. This same topic came up a couple of years later with Kevin Harvey at Rhys when discussing his various vineyards. Although the Skyline wasn’t the coolest of his vineyards, it had the poorest soil which really makes the plant struggle to ripen and forces the roots very deep to find water.

Dressner at Poole's

A Louis/Dressner wine dinner at Poole’s Diner in Raleigh. Ashley made a hell of a meal to go with the wines and the staff, and especially Matt Fern made it a very fun evening. The wines all showed remarkably well. Must have been a Thai Stripper day on the Biodynamic Calender.

(2008) François Pinon Vouvray Brut Non Dosé
Nice mousse and a fine structure. Lovely bread and pitted fruit notes. Unapologetically bubbly chenin. Maybe lacks the depth of Huet, but this was clean, vibrant and superb, overall. The Pinon wines are such remarkably rock solid values.

1999 Luneau-Papin Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine Le L D'Or
I tasted from 3 different bottles of this, two of which were brilliant. There was a mature depth to the fruit, a kind of bottle sweetness, and a real viscous sense of the earth. Probably the best experience I’ve ahd with this wine. The third bottle wasn’t corked or otherwise flawed. It seemed younger and also completely flat and innocuous. Almost like another vintage was mislabeled.

2008 Franck Peillot Roussette du Bugey Altesse de Montagnieu
The Alpine meadow strikes again. Frank makes such a lovely version of altesse. It is floral and yellow and gentle, but just when you think you have it figured out, it is something else. This wine is terribly easy to drink and graces the table rather well. The course here was an expertly fried chicken thigh over an okra hash. Everything was right with the world.

2008 Arianna Occhipinti Sicilia IGT SP68
This was the best showing for this in a while. It had everything I loved about this wine, from the startlingly pure and focused aromatics to the crisp and refreshing palate. I love the wines sharpness and cut, although I can see where it might be too acidic for some folks. This was served with some crazy ass carnitas dish over fresh butterbean and corn succotash style dish.

2005 Clos Rougeard (Foucault) Saumur-Champigny Le Clos
This is great wine. For several years, I made the mistake of buying all the Poyeux and Bourg I could afford, but ignoring the Clos. In fact, the Clos (unsurprisingly) is much closer to the Bourg in comportment. While young, this was velvety and quite long. It needs five or so years and will probably drink beautifully for 20 or even more, but can be enjoyed with the right food by the impatient. With Piedmontese beef over a foraged mushroom risotto, one couldn’t ask for more.

Fucking cork great Sec

1996 Huët Vouvray Sec Le Mont
Wesley had never tried a Huet Sec and I was hoping to check in on this and see how it was doing. He is a convert for life. This bottle was magnificent. At the first nose, I thought this would be another case of a wine that won’t budge: a force-field of rocks and minerals. However, the palate was more resolved and as it opened up, it started to display, lanolin, honey and all those really cool secondary nuances. As good a white wine as I’ve had yet this year. I think this is in a beautiful place right now. Wait and you run the risk missing it in this flower.

1998 Mugneret Ruchottes-Chambertin
Corked. Tear. The last vintage before the really old section of vines was torn out due to disease.

2002 Clos Rougeard Saumur-Champigny Les Poyeux
A replacement off the list for the corked Mugneret. Decanted, but that still wasn’t enough to get it open enough. Don’t get me wrong, the wine was still very good, especially the texture on the palate and the balance of the wine. It was just that it didn’t want to pop. It would have preferred to be left alone.

Young Rougeard

2006 Domaine de Roally Viré-Clessé Tradition
I had a glass of this and while not showing quite as gloriously as a recent bottle, this has really morphed into an interesting wine. I really have a soft spot for this chardonnay and the other wines of the vigneron Gautier Thévenet. He is doing superb work carrying on a noble tradition of excellence.

2004 Clos Rougeard (Foucault) Saumur-Champigny
This is the “Clos” or basic bottling, whatever that means in the context of Clos Rougeard. I think this is from vineyards around the cave that are not Bourg. Of course this is way too young, but I don’t remember how the Clos tasted and wanted to give it a shot. I was surprised with how enjoyable it was. While it will certainly be more expressive and dramatic with some time, I was glad to have caught it in an exuberantly youthful stage. What was so striking about it was the incredible coolness of the flavors and the impeccable balance. I bought this off my brothers list at Rue Cler, where it is something like $59. A very fair price for a Rougeard wine, I think. It paired superbly with the brisket on the prix fixe.