Community Tasting Note

• Blair Curtis wrote: 83 points

  June 18, 2019 - Did not enjoy this nearly as much as I had hoped. For reference, I am a big fan of traditional Northern Rhone reds. Levet is a fave, along with Gonon and older Clape. This wine, bottled at 12%, is so lean that it is skinny on flavour. The good news is that it has none of the flavours of surmaturity...no jamminess or heavy sweet fruit. The bad news is that it also lacks the good flavours you want in a wine like this...there is no pepper, no meat, no smoke. Just a high-acid lean and tart wine. It was acceptable with grilled steak, but this is not a wine I would purchase again.

  1 person found this helpful 1,937 views

4 Comments

• MLipton commented:

  6/18/19, 3:35 PM - Drinking a Texier wine at age 3 is not a recipe for success. Very likely it's shut down and regardless it will be years before it comes into its own. I don't know if you drink Levet or Gonon at this age, but I subscribe to the "rule of 15" for N Rhone Syrah and generally try to open them at age 15 or so.

• Mikaelbe commented:

  6/18/19, 3:48 PM - Agree with the wines needing time, had a 2013 a while back - beautiful after breathing, started to show really well from the second day onwards.

• Blair Curtis commented:

  6/18/19, 4:03 PM - Thanks to other users for comments. I try to buy sufficient quantities of the wines I like so that I can try a bottle early on. I understand that fine wines will be better later, but I want a baseline for what is in the bottle. I suggest this approach to everyone. I don't think it is wise to buy wines blindly, hold for 15 years and hope for the best. So I know very well what young Levet, Gonon and Clape taste like...they all taste a lot better than this, except from terrible vintages like 2003 (bad in a different way), etc. I could be wrong, but in my view this wine just lacks stuffing. Lots of better places to spend my wine money!

• MLipton commented:

  6/20/19, 12:30 PM - Blair, I was not meaning to imply that one shouldn't open them at all until age 15. As you suggest, following the wine over time by periodic sampling is indeed a good strategy. I'd just caution about drawing too many inferences from such a young showing. Stylistically, Eric Texier's wines tend to be very backwards and need a lot of time to show well. Giving a young Texier wine a hard decant and long aeration might ameliorate that backwardness to an extent but occasionally a wine that's shut down hard won't come out of its shell no matter how much we coax it. Since you like other traditionalists such as Levet and Gonon, I'd suspect that you'll like the Brezeme later in its development. FWIW, I find his St Julien en Alban to be more approachable young.

Add a Comment