A friend was having a party and there was plenty of fun stuff to drink.
We started off swallowing large mouthfuls of the easy-to-drink 2009 Pépière Muscadet that had the appropriate bit of plump that one expects given what one has heard of 2009. But still all the drunken-thirst-quenching qualities one has come to know and love from this wine. I was both hungry and thirsty and this went perfectly with large mouthfuls of a huge wheel of gouda that my friend had brought directly from Holland, via Curaçao.
I don’t drink much Southern Rhone wine and I had not heard of the producer, but when I saw that it was from Chambers I figured there could be no harm in opening the 2007 Burle Vacqueyras. The alcohol was a bit higher than ideal for late afternoon drinking (14.5% on the label) but it did not taste hot and actually tasted very delicious. So I kept drinking more than I should have. There were plenty of ripe fruits but with enough flavor nuances and subtleties to remind me that these wines are worth drinking afterall!
For some reason many of the non-winos at the gathering preferred the 2007 Bruno Colin Santenay VV. Maybe they thought it was more important because it was Burgundy. Or maybe they liked all the oak. Because that was the only thing I tasted. It was easy to drink structurally and very ‘expressive’, if you consider oak an expression. Because it mainly seemed about toasty spicy oak. Not a whole lot of fruit showing underneath, at least right now. Am I wrong? Why would someone put that much oak on a Santenay? Is it worth the cost?
Things got darker outside (and we were outside) and darker in the glasses as we went through some 2008 Iché VdP de l'Hérault Les Hérétiques. I wasn’t a huge fan of this back in the fall but it has mellowed and formed with a few months of time and is a lot easier for me to drink now. YMMV.