2017 Domaine Charvin Châteauneuf-du-Pape
Community Tasting Note
Fractalage Likes this wine:
Monday, September 11, 2023 - On a warm summer evening such as this, a bottle of Charvin feels perfect, and even more so with the 2017 before me with its intensely elegant nose of raspberries, garrigue and citrus.
Its palate has spunk, length, lots of stars and very interesting flavors of fruit and heated hill shrubs. Its length makes this a joyous song in my mouth. Absence of oak, its rarity, heritage, and purity make this bottle ever more perfect for Monday sunset with the crickets.
I’m somewhat of a strange wine lover as I do not particularly like Grenache, but here, I do.
This cuvee has a delicious crunch, probably from its whole cluster fermentation in concrete. So endearing is this crunch that I’m tempted to create a new word for it: Crunch-Garrigue. The presence of citrus, raspberry and crunch of herbal tars slowly taint my mouth and build with every sip rendering it more crunchy with garrigue. Love this! Excellent! Celebrate on 9-11! I drink to the memory celebrating life as the moments of mortality bring profundity of now.
A case of this to enjoy for years to come! It will assuredly get better.
The next day, 29 hours later from undecanted bottle, poured the last glass:
Gorgeous nose with pronounced cola and berries. Could live in this nose. Flowers, perfume.
Palate of concentrated flowers with crunch of garrigue. It’s concentrated potpourri. Energy galore! It spanks my palate. It explodes in my mouth. It's rich and makes me wow as to its density and levity. Great wine.
As fresh as this is from overnight in bottle with about 6oz left, this is a cellar keeper. It will last for a decade more +.
Excellent wine. Well made.
I keep revisiting the nose in my Riedel Burgundy glass: Holy fresh flowers aromas with garrigue. Just love it!
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2 comments have been posted
1 person found this helpful, do you? Yes - No / Report Issue (1,602 views)
Comment posted by peeks13:
9/16/2023 10:29:00 PM - Given your long description, why didn't you rate it?
Comment posted by Fractalage:
9/17/2023 12:36:00 AM - @peeks13
Great question.
Assuming you mean rating with a numerical number, I've got lots to say on that matter, but addressing the core of the question, the rating of the wine, well, I do rate the wine. Words of descriptive nature tell far more than a number.
My opinion is that wine numbers are bullshit: Sheer, plump, seething numerical bags of wet dung, that when popped can give to the imbiber no more knowledge on the juice than a few whiffs and some sips. The very subjective nature of every palate reduced to a number is absolutely meaningless. It unveils the nature of today’s culture of wine, the ignorance of wine, the actual stupidity of attributing what the liquid can import to a number. Those who play along with 50-100 have given up, thrown in the towel on educating the public. The very action of acquiescing to this ridiculous system lessens the seriousness of the efforts taken to produce something of real, of quality of wine to bring humans closer to the Gods.
If we do a really good job of really educating the public on wine, say, maybe teaching viticulture in elementary school, or encouraging families to grow gardens by giving huge tax breaks and even more so for making wine, having local bathtub wine competitions, or simply requiring ingredients on the labels, with lab tests for herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and fake shit, then maybe the masses would stop buying the poison plonk because of a price or rating, and force the industry to go real.
Do you think that in a small rural town of wine producers they give a darn about drinking a wine with a Parker rating? Well, I don’t either.
In fact, that meaningless number never tells me if the wine had been soaked in oak dust, or if the producer chaptalized, or if the vines were sprayed with pesticides, or if the grapes were inoculated. It tells me nothing what is really important to know in a wine.
Do you think that if a 95 point wine has cancer causing agents in it, such as glyphosate, that the rater should be liable for the possible cancer it might bring to the drinker, because assuredly those 95+ ratings exponentially increase consumption. Will there be a karmic blowback on these numeric assigners that might hold them back from a possible moksha?
I must say again, great question.