A renewed love maybe?

When summer hits, I always stock up some wines, which I can taste with my feet up and hopefully enjoy some nice Danish weather. This was certainly the case this year. So I was looking for some nice offerings at my favourite wine shop and the owner pointed at this wine. “What about Syrah – Rhone?” What about that one;

2009 Dard et Ribo Crozes-Hermitage Rouge, “C'est le Printemps ”.

No way, dude, I thought. Finally did I get rid of all my Rhone wines and I am not touching that area anymore, my friend. I felt all the prejudices working inside me and a wave of alcoholic, dense, over extracted, horse stinking wines (brett / brettanomyces) with absolutely no drinking pleasure whatsoever coming towards me. No chance in hell that I would go back to that Parkerized crap again.

But I did – for 4 reasons.

1) I trust my wine pushers taste. 2) The wine was 17,-€ 3) the label said 12.2% Alc – so a chance of a wine, which I can actually drink, without falling asleep. Finally 4) it’s of course idiotic to discard Rhone completely and generalize so rudely. It’s fine to be critic, but I have to say, that I have lost touch on Rhône since the 2003 vintage and haven’t really tasted much. So I stay humble and why not always be curious?

So how was it?

The wine was beautiful and it’s once again one of those wines which bring you back to your roots. I have said this over and over again – the drinking pleasure (how odd it may sound) is one of the most underrated values we have in modern wine judgment. This wine has tons of drinking pleasure. It’s also a wine, which is very primary – even the colour is purple and the fruit feels like a freshly picked bowl of cherries, blue and blackberries. I have tasted it three times now and the last time I decanted, as the red cherry note takes on a little more refined tone. There is also a typical trademark of the Syrah grape – the note of liquorice. But that note is actually delicious as it’s not toned in a usual bombastic way – NO! Its cool tempered, even the wines spicy touch is not peppery, it’s refined – and the wine is in general shining with remarkable simple freshness and the desire to smell and taste is constantly on the rise. Taste has divine simple and juicy curl around the tongue.

Less is more – I wish all Rhone wines would be like this. Well done.

Glass: Zalto Burgundy