In a recent tasting note I said I bloody hate Grenache-based wines – they are normally too heavy, boozy and hard work. Given this, my excellent chum Lance Foyster, a wine merchant I’ve known for 20 years, decided to send me this bottle of 14.5% Grenache. I can only imagine he did this to continue the tradition of him giving me punishing tasting experiences, as he did when he was training the blind tasting team at Oxford. There cannot be any other reason, he would know I’d absolutely despise this wine and savage it as competently as I can after being incapacitated by its frightening booze quotient. I’ve had two tastes whilst I’ve been writing this paragraph and I already feel pissed as a fart.
Collioure can be good. I used to buy the Domaine du Mas Blanc ones quite regularly, but they were cheap and clocked in at around 13%. I don’t know how much this wine costs, presumably the aviation fuel the winemaker adds to it bumps up the price a bit, but there is no price I would pay at which this wine would satisfy me in any way. Indeed, even at the price of ‘free’ I’m vaguely irked that Lance had the temerity to send it to me. OK, that has been enough invective in this introductory preamble, let’s get to the appalling horror of analysing this by means of *shudder* tasting the stuff.
Collioure Schistes 2011, Coume del Mas
The nose repels me: it is an odd combination of cough candy twist boiled sweets, volatile acidity and pine-scented clumping cat litter of the type that Kisu the cat would rather avoid. Oh yes, there is one hell of a lot of alcohol as well. To deny this is incredibly ‘hot and sweet’ would be as big a duplicitous act as claiming Ed Milliband was ‘charming with integrity’. I said aviation fuel in above, but presumably aviation fuel from some experimental, hyper-sonic, scram-jet vehicle. If I look at my glass with too hard a stare it will ignite, and the whole beast of a nose makes me not want to look at it ever again. Is there a hint of celery there as well? By arse, I hate celery. The palate just tips over the wrong side of the extraction boundary to ‘over’ and it has one of the most repulsive textures of any wine I’ve had in a period of time. It’s bitter, acrid, harsh and utterly devoid of features that would make anyone say they’d fancy drinking a charming bottle of this with their luncheon this afternoon. Indeed, it’s so fabulously lacking charm we could be back to making unfavourable comparisons with Ed Milliband again. The booze level is fiery and reminds me of the time an Alaskan forester defiled some de Montille Burgundy I opened by pouring Everclear (70% booze) into his glass because he “wouldn’t get hammered on this dishwater”. The bastard. I took my bottle elsewhere. And that is what I am going to do with this, I shall take it to The Editor (who charitably claims “even though I hate it, it’s not entirely badly made”; to be fair his comments on the winemaker’s aesthetic ideals are spot on) and let him see if he fancies getting ripped to the tits on firewater Collioure. I’m not going to finish my glass.
Please, Lance, never make me taste this again – it just makes me unhappy.
Just for the record I think this is a really good wine ( and Clark Foyster Wines are the importers ).
I linked to your website, Lance, don’t worry.
I fully understand that you were not trying to make me unhappy, rather get a spume of invective as a tasting note. However, good wine, really good wine, does it for me in a really mind expanding manner that can so illuminate my life that even things as important as doing what The Editor tells me without question are just erased from my mind. I have a carefully informed stylistic ideal that brings me to rapture and that explosion of ecstasy is what I want.
When a wine it utterly removed from my preferred aesthetic, my disappointment at not getting my quality buzz can develop into profound unhappiness and the nasty Davy, who says unnecessarily offensive things about people far more successful and popular than I’ll ever be, raises his floridly abusive head. Indeed, ignoring times of major insanity I think I’m at my most articulate when I’m incredibly unhappy or let down. I’m great in restaurants when they serve me a shit meal!
However, I am a fundamentally happy person. So after I rejected my remaining Collioure, went to lie down only to have the cat come and sit on me and start honking like a goose; my cheery disposition soon returned. So no harm done!
Even though it did bring lurid invective to my keyboard it was still very kind of you to send me the wine – it’s good to keep one’s palate exercised with a degree of variety. Next time can you send that freaking quadruple-A Echezeaux from Confused-Genderbender that was so good at your Burgundy tasting, please? I don’t drink enough Echezeaux and that would be just the practise I need to keep me up to scratch!
I like Ed Milliband!
Oh yeah, of course, Ed, as you say, you’re a Socialist (an extreme example of the Champagne Socialist type).
The more decadent I am the sooner the revolution will come. It is my socialist duty to consume in order to provoke the lumpen.
Raise a glass to us revolutionaries!
Oh I will. Perhaps some cristal? It has pleasing Russian connotations.
Anyone who would start a commentary with your first line is to be ignored, which I will do now. Further you are an obvious fool to make such a statement.
What a rude man you are, G. But I do feel for you in that your parents only gave you a letter as a name…
Love the note. David, you would hate 90% of what is in my cellar, though you might like my riesling inventory and the Burgs I buy to experiment with 😉
PS Everclear is 95% alcohol. Thats right, 190 proof. 🙂
Ah life would be boring if we’d all liked the same stuff, Humberto, so I hope you enjoy that 90% of your cellar. I’ll pop around later this evening for some Riesling, if you have no other plans…
I expect I would enjoy this wine just as little as you, David,though I would probably blame myself. i do expect great things of Miliband minor, however. We need to be governed by Jewish intellectuals from Hampstead, it is the way things should be.