2 Wines

[Florida Jim]

With meat loaf and all the fixin’s:

1996 Clos Marie, Les Glorieuses:

This Pic Saint Loup has a warm fruit nose with saline, some sour oak and mineral tones; its attack is mouth-watering and the flavors follow the nose (absent the wood) but it all comes apart at mid-palate as the alcohol (14% on the label) morphs it into some brandy-esque grotesque; short, hot finish.

This stuff now sells from three to four times the $20 paid for this bottle on release. If it continues these super-ripe alcohol levels, it isn’t worth what I paid. Imported by Eric Solomon.

1999 Eric Texier, Cotie-Rotie VV:

The Chave of Cote-Rotie; damn this is good!

Utterly captivating nose of ash tray, olive, aquarium, warm plums, red fruit, mineral, salt; with every element in complete harmony and balanced with all the others; delineated, layered, complex and expansive (hold on kids, it gets better);

Medium bodied with penetrating intensity on the palate, a nod toward rusticity but nothing out of place or noticeably tannic or over-powering, flavors follow the nose and seem to burst on the tongue, well structured, very complex, balanced to perfection, and doing that voodoo that only great wine can do – finesse in the face of power, strong flavors that never intrude on one another and form a complete whole, the ever present sense of the particular earth where it was grown despite ripe (but never over-ripe fruit), depth in sync with breadth, and so on, and so on . . .;

Long, strong finish. Imported by Louis-Dressner (then).

One of those, “now that I have you, buckle your seat belt, amigo, because you’re about to find out what an E ticket is” type wines that takes you where you have never been but doesn’t leave the track. Benchmark Cote-Rotie. One of the smartest (read luckiest) things I ever did was to buy a case of this. Decades of life ahead. If I were king of the world this would be my house red.

Oh my!

Best, Jim

Edited June 23, 2004 by Florida Jim (log)