2015 Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme Cheverny Rouge

Community Tasting Notes (2) Avg Score: 88.5 points

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  12/6/2022 - lake.vino Likes this wine: 90 Points

  A lot pretty red fruit still there, a bit crunchy cranberry, and a lot mineral and acid. This is cleaner and less brett driven than some earlier bottles of this I've had. Tea like hints, and warm spices - sort of reminds me of chai tea - in a very good way - enhanced with substnatial fruit notes. Great acid, plenty of mineral, what oak was used is minimal I'd guess. Long finish given lightness of the wine.

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  5/15/2017 - bevetroppo Likes this wine: 87 Points

  If you search my notes on Loire wines you'll see a frequently recurring theme, namely, you can forget about learning anything from the labels, almost like the producers are going out of the way to say f/u. Look it up or shut up. Unfortunately, you can't even look this wine up on google. Even the redoubtable combination of Louis/Dressner (importer) and Chambers Street (a retailer of same) has absolutely zero to say about this specific wine on 5/15/17. The Dressner site talks about a partnership between Bonhomme and Thierry Puzelat, which as far as I can tell from the label no longer exists, at least not explicitly or in this bottling. It stirs enormous ennui in me just to report this much.
  
  Some other intrepid denizen of cellartracker has managed to deduce this wine is made from 100% gamay. That may be true. I just can't prove it, and I'm not skillful enough to say from tasting alone whether there's any pinot in it, which is allowed in Cheverny.
  
  Where's there's needless obscurity, there's usually natural winemaking and the poetic stylings of some millennial biodynamiste or "organiste" nearby. I take it from the available background on Pierre-Oliver Bonhomme that he is of that ilk, so it's not even ironic that this cellartracker entry may be mislabeled since it says "Puzelat-Bonhomme". I just don't have the energy to fight it.
  
  The wine certainly is too light to have much cab franc or heaven forbid cot, if any. It has the raw unfinished nose of a natural wine, equal parts dark red berry fruits, citrus and dirt, which is meant as a compliment. These are the main elements that carry through to the light and highly quaffable palate, which is best served at cellar temperature. 12.5% ABV.
  
  I find wines like this one quite indistinguishable from similarly made gamay in Beaujolais, which is not to say they are generic at all. Like Phillip the Bold said in the 14th century, it's probably just that "disloyal" gamay giving everything it's got. Either that, or I need a masterclass on the differences, which is a little too obscure a pursuit even for me.

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