Lafon on acid

Lafon’s basic red wine! A chance to taste Lafon’s stylish red wines for a fraction of what the Volnays go for – cannot go wrong, right? Especially in 2009 there should be a mass of ripe fruit to deal with and it should be totally delicious, right?

Wrong! I am sure you are aware of the idea that one cannot smell acidity. This may be true, but I am becoming ever more convinced one can smell compounds associated with acidity.

I cannot count the number of times I have stuck my nose into a German Riesling or Burgundy from a miserable vintage and thought it was going to be (Swedish construction) shit-acidic. I cannot think of an occasion where I have been wrong. Now you have been warned, onto the note!

Horrible LafonMonthelie Premier Cru Les Duresses 2009, Domaine Comte Lafon

The nose has a lot of really pretty, ripe fruit; you would expect this from a 2009. In this respect it smells like a dream Bourgogne Rouge.

However, it has that slightly green, slightly grassy, slightly leafy aroma of unripeness that screams out, “I am going to burn a hole through your stomach!”.

And bloody hell it nearly did. Sure, there was a lot of nice ripe fruit, but the acid level was totally intolerable and unacceptable in what is a £40 wine.

Not only is it shit-acidic but it also has no structure to speak of. There is just fruit and bitch-loads of acidity. Given my rich and broad experience with Lafon wines I am surprised to find that it is not shit-tannic, but the fucker is simply a bottle of hydrochloric acid with some strawberries in it.

This is just bloody awful. The amazing thing is it is a 2009, one of the ripest vintages ever. If they could not bake the searing acidity out of it in 2009 I hate to think what people who purchased 2011s are thinking when they pop theirs. Probably that lighting a fire with £50 notes would have been a more profitable use of their cash.

This is insulting to customers who pay over the odds for the Lafon name only to get fruity acid with no tannin. It might have been a pleasant quaffing wine if the acidity had been cold-stabilised out of it. But as it stands, this is complete crap and is the final nail in the coffin of my desire to acquire Lafon reds.

Just throw your bottles at someone you really hate, or sell them to an idiot, that is the only pleasure you will get out of this wine.


 

That’s it! I am giving up accruing Comte Lafon reds (although most have been stolen anyway)! The ‘good’ ones exist in a state of absolute zero-esque unchangingly tough permanence; they do not so much age as persist being hard, miserable and joyless. A 1993 Volnay-Santenots-du-Millieu I had relatively recently clearly demonstrated this. His slightly less ludicrously expensive, but still expensive, ones such as this are just shit. Utter shit. Well he can take other people’s piss with the prices he charges, I’m not lining his pockets anymore.

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