It has been indicated to me that I haven't been writing enough about wine on here. I'm not going to apologise for writing about cheese and other nice things as I'm hardly to blame for the fact that G has failed to set up his companion blog. We came up with the name Odyssey du Chevre the other night which is hard to beat in the pretentiousness stakes, so really now there is no excuse.
Anyway, back to wine. G brought back this half of Mercurey from his recent trip to Paris. I'm not sure which wine merchant or supermarket it came from but believe it cost around 8 euros or so. It's a premier cru we haven't had before and is a monopole so an especially good find. I'd never heard of Domaine de la Framboisiere but the label design looked familiar and the back label indicated that this is an offshoot of Domaine Faiveley - it's the name they're giving to their Cote Chalonnaise wines. I'm not sure I like the name as it's difficult not to think of raspberries when you see that on the label, and I don't want to have preconceptions like that.
2003 is a controversial year as it was unusually hot, and many of the wines have a baked character and are big, sweet and jammy. I didn't like the vintage initially, but changed my mind later, or perhaps with age the wines improved. But this Mercurey was not what we were expecting at all. It looked nice, dark and glossy, but on the nose we got black fruits (no sign of raspberries!) and on the palate it was surprisingly restrained and could only be described as austere, with savoury flavours such as cocoa. If it was like this in '03, we wondered what on earth it would be like in a normal year. But it was perfectly enjoyable, rated a high 7, and was given the accolade from my student days: "good with burgers".
This is the fifth Mercurey we've tasted during the Premier Cru Project. We've given three a score of 7 and two a score of 8; I suspect that Mercurey will probably never rank higher than this, although I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.
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