Community Tasting Note

• JohnMcIlwain Likes this wine:

  April 4, 2021 - Last minute (okay, decanted for 90 minutes) sub for a corked bottle of Balthazar 12 Cornas Casimir. Pretty nose, red flowers and blue fruits with just a bit of the young Syrah gaminess lending interest. And a touch of balsamy wood (I’ll get to that later). Fairly dense and textured on the palate with ripe blue fruit and game notes with a bit of black pepper and cedar bring up the rear. Plenty of tannins currently sheathed with the bountiful dry extract. This is a young wine and shows it. The woody bit is an occasional feature of just-past young Syrah and oft-maligned by folks who haven’t experienced it. As Claude Kolm has pointed out, you can wait it out and it knits imperceptibly. And as a way of example, there are plenty of folks who’ve mistaken M. Texier for Jean-Luc Colombo when such a comparison is clearly spurious. Back to the wine: honestly, give this 7-10 years and beyond and it will shine, but right now it’s mostly (vast) potential. Enjoyable with venison and a wild blueberry/red wine reduction, but not yet the wine it should be. Hold for sure.

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3 Comments

• bevetroppo commented:

  4/6/21, 6:00 AM - Hi, John. Don't know if you saw my comment on your Instagram post. This woodsy thing, could you talk a little more about it? I've experienced something I would have called "weedy" and I wonder if it's the same thing?I know it's not TCA whatever it is. I have a funny story to tell you once I know what I'm talking about here. Thanks, Tom

• JohnMcIlwain commented:

  4/6/21, 7:17 AM - Hey Tom, I commented further down the thread. To the effect that Claude Kolm has noted the phenomenon and often that brûléed character (more textural than aromatic) does seem to recede with time in most cases. Just how much time is certainly debatable.

• bevetroppo commented:

  4/6/21, 7:59 AM - Ok here goes. A few years ago my brother and I ordered a relatively recent bottle of Jamet Collines Rhodaniennes (I think) at Aldo Sohm's wine bar. It had an offensive level of what tasted to me like weeds, but could it have been woodsy or bruleed? Maybe. In any event I did not like the wine because of this quality and tried to send it back. The great man himself came over to my table and couldn't have been a bigger dick about it. I wish he had explained what you did, assuming he knows, but neither he nor his servers would admit there was something weird about the wine. I know I'm not crazy but it's bothered me ever since and at least now you've given me a theory to work with.

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