"Finally, another really good wine in the glass," my wife said laconically when the wine had been poured in the restaurant and the first impressions were spreading through the nose and palate. "I've had to be viciously down lately!". Indeed, for the past two weeks, I've been exploring the small wine shops and the not-much-larger seaside grocery stores where seaside tourists stock up on wine - for quick consumption. There is indeed little really good, but much trivial, but thank God also little really bad to find. We are, after all, in the middle of a diverse wine region, the largest in France, where wine is part of everyday life. But most of these wines are local at best and are hard to find in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Not so this wine from Minervois. It has long attracted the attention of the "wine popes" and is therefore exported - although not in large quantities. However, there are not large quantities of this independent wine from a vineyard that is rather "in the valley" than in the heights (or slopes) of the adjacent mountains. Pique-Perlou is a vineyard on the Canal de Midi. Hachette uses the analogy with horses to describe the wine: "...two strong characters, Syrah and Carignan combine. The result is a thoroughbred coming out at full gallop. A perfume of garigues, red berries and candied fruits, melted vanilla, well-formed tannins...All ending in a dignified trot and a friendly evolution that leads far away" (loosely translated). My question: where do they lead, the "dignified trot and friendly evolution"?
To a wine that, despite its age (five years), still has a slightly purple, dark color, develops a great bouquet and can develop a lot of fruit deep into the finish, is a bit fat (alcohol 14.5 vol%), but develops aromas of licorice, wind roses and dark chocolate on the nose and reminds of plums and some dried meat on the palate. The wine is said to have been made from only the grapes from one hectare of old vines, so there are only a few thousand bottles of it. And as if this could be proven: When we wanted to reorder a second bottle, the cellar master of the restaurant reported: drunk out!