WINE OF THE WEEK #080

Yo Tumblrz,

I’m not allowed to curse on my blog (I think) but godd*mned time flies.
We are already at our last bottle from the Loire valley and I would have had no objection if there would be another box waiting for me. The flexibility of the region is just amazing. And to showcase this, I saved the next bottle until the end:

Jean-François Mérieau - AOC Touraine- Cent visages 2009

At first I thought I picked up a rather special wine, because I did not expect to find a Malbec wine in the Loire valley. But, it turns out Malbec used to be one of the most planted grapes in the region, and it is also known as Côt ( just like in Cahors).

Luckily for me, Jean-Francois Mérieau is a rather special guy. He is a fantastic young winemaker who buys old vines from the region, replants them and tries to maintain the history and tradition from the region. Amongst his vineyards, you will find offcourse Cabernet Franc, but also Pinot Noir, Gamay, Malbec and Sauvignon Blanc. If that was not enough, he works the vineyards biodynamically and with very low yeilds to extract the best possible expression.

What I really like about this wine, and probably some other wines he makes, is that they are only slightly filtered. Unfiltered wines tend to be a bit funky from time to time, but if you really want to get the full expression (without being afraid of some funny or difficult flavors) of a grape variety or soil type, unfiltered wine is really cool te taste.

So let’s go! :)

Appearance
The colour is absolutely stunning. It is a very deep grenade red and it has something burlesque about it. The longer I stare, the more I get lost in the glass. Dangerous!

Nose
Wham! It’s like somebody is squeezing fresh fruits in your face.
Never felt so much energy and pleasure.

The nose is literally packed with black fruit : black cherry, prunes and just a hint of pomegranate. And now that I am writing these notes, the fruit is making place for some other cool stuff : leather, pencil shavings, bacon, chocolate and very strong punch of (have a seat) grinded poppy seeds.

The nose is so complex, yet so playful and vivid, I just want to drink it!

Taste
I don’t know what to say and I’m very amazed.
This wine is the exact opposite of rocket science: it is a direct link with nature: so fresh, light, delicious, soft, full of flavor and amazingly balanced.

A wonderful layer of prunes and more red fruits now is carried by this black dusty component. I described it as pencil shavings and poppy seeds on the nose, but it now acts more as a kind of smooth oily dark layer, like if they added a drop of soy sauce to the wine.

Finish
There is no particular evolution on the finish, but the wine just keeps on doing what started on the nose. It keeps me busy, it keeps me sippin’ again and again and I got the feeling this is what wine would have tasted like 100 years ago.

The link that I feel with nature right now, the amazing expression of grape and terroir, and that extra layer of magic makes this just an epic bottle of wine in all its simplicity. Try it!

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Infographics

Hi there,

If you’ve been following me on social media these last couple of days, you will have noticed that I was in Austria for a wine trip. In between the hills of Burgenland and Wagram, I realised that I almost completely turned my back on something very valuable : my wine blog.

Talking about my blog makes me feel really proud and I still believe my approach to write a weekly wine review was the right way for me to build knowledge, fun and self confidence about wine. Although I don’t feel the urge anymore to go looking for that special bottle every week, I think I should write an update more regularly.

So for starters, I wanted to highlight my wine infographics. They have been living a life of their own since the day they came online, and have been used in wine courses in Europe, in wine shops as posters and even published in books on the wine making process all over the world. There is just something fun and light about them that I still like today. And be honest, who likes to read a long explanation about the wine making process.

If you like them and would like to use an infographic on your blog or in an article, just send me an e-mail at jelle.deroeck@gmail.com and I will send the original files asap.

Cheers and I hope to see you soon!

JDR

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Hey Wine Snob, fuck you!

Dear wine connaisseur, this wine post is for you.

I wrote my final wine review more than a year ago. Tired of repeating the same concept over and over again and ready to head somewhere else with the sparse free time that was left inside my head. I was completely done with sniffing, swirling, spitting, figuring out notes and complexity and so on… “Where is this going to?!” was the question that was growing inside my head.

So I stopped writing, stopped tasting wines, started running, cycling, drawing and exploring new stuff. I didn’t touch my wine cellar for a while, maybe opened 2 or 3 bottles in the next 4 months and actually started having trouble getting excited over picking a wine in a restaurant or being invited to tastings or events. I even got afraid to open that €17 bottle of wine that used to got me all hyped up…

But recently, I felt a new energy, got a bit thirsty again and I started opening more wines. I drank more with my soul than I tasted with my palate. I lost a lot of my tasting skills anyway after a wile. I noticed that bottles got empty without me making an opinion about the wines, nor feeling the need to post them online and make some cool statement about them.

It was on the road to Reims, with my wine twin Filip Salmon, that I had an epiphany. We were going to visit Champagne for the weekend, had quite some visits planned and we were thinking about what we were looking for in the wines that we were about to taste. I noted down my top 3:

Rock ‘n roll
Character
Edge

And then I realised that I didn’t wrote down typical champagne notes, flavours or any other wine terminology… I wrote down what I am looking for in my journey to become a better version of myself. And than I knew it!

The wine that you like, is the wine that fits you.
You better look for stuff you understand, like “funny”, “girly”, “rough”, “explosion”, “ballerina”, “leather jacket” - while instead going for stuff the wine teacher tells you, like “complexity”, minerality", “elegance”, “evolution”.
To hell! with tasting notes of this, perfumes of that, minerality, age, appellations, grape varieties or whatever.
If you taste with your soul and you like it, it is the best wine there is.

We, “wine snobs”, slip down that path of connoisseurship so easily. Trying to impress our readers, the media agencies that offer us nice trips, the sommeliers that we adore, the people around the table at events…
We taste with our minds, start with what we learned, but don’t get to grips with what excites us.

We try to be smart but forget to be stupid.

From now on, I’ll only play stupid.

wine tasting blog wineblog snob sommelier