A Wine Diary

This is a beauty. Someone (smithco) left a comment on Cork’d about the 2001 vintage of the same wine, “This is as good as a red wine gets” and I fully agree. This was the wine my wife and myself chose as the best one among the many of the wines we tried at the O’Briens Wine Fair and decided to buy a case of it. Since then, we’ve been enjoying it occasionally and the last bottle is about to end, still providing us with joy and causing respect and admiration.

The wine was rated 4/5 by decanter.com and the following comment was left: “Rich nose, concentrated deep fruit. Rich, concentrated palate. Big wine, smooth. Drink 2007-10″. Well, we obviously couldn’t resist drinking it all in 2006. A truely great wine, highly recommended. This is the kind of wine I currently consider as perfect.

Price: €13.99
Score: 10/10
Typical Grape Composition: Grenache/Syrah

There is a very nice article about the Rasteau village, “A Small Town in France” written by Dave McIntyre. Here is a short excerpt related specifically at this village, but the whole article is inspiring and well worth a read.

My fantasy town is Rasteau. You may have heard of it, then again maybe not. It bears a minor distinction in the hierarchy of the appellation controllee laws in that its name can appear on a wine label above the generic appellation “Côtes du Rhône-Villages.” Eighteen other villages share that modest distinction, sort of an official, “Hey, not bad!” from the Parisian bureaucracy. This places them below the 14 crus (such as Châteuneuf-du-Pape and Vacqueyras) that stand alone as village names, but above anonymous Côtes du Rhône-Villages and Côtes du Rhône.

To learn more about the Rasteau village and see some pictures, visit provenceweb.fr

Technorati Tags: Rasteau, Grenache

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 7:02 pm and is filed under France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.