Score: 91/100
This white wine by Pic Saint Loup winery Château Puech-Haut is a blend of 70 % Grenache blanc with 30 % Viognier aged in demi-muids (large oak barrels) on lees for 10 months.
Tasting Notes
This white Languedoc wine comes rather in an intense lemon-yellow color, the very ripe lemon type, bright and deep with some gold hues. Given the wine’s relatively young age, its color does suggest we’ve got here a wine that has gone through barrel during its making.
The nose confirms this impression with plenty of sweet vanilla, sweet spices, and honey aromas. But the aromatic profile goes much beyond oak only, it’s actually very well integrated.
The wine bursts with vibrant and appetizing notes of ripe apricot and pear, rose petals, and fresh grapes. It’s pungent and powerfully fruity, also floral to smell at. The whole feels generous thanks to the ripeness of its fruit character. Yet it’s elegant and deep thanks to its aromatic complexity. Very tempting to smell at, you just want to dig and find out whether it tastes as good as it smells!
And it does… and better.
This is a dry white, but with a gorgeous oily texture, and a sense of sweetness provided again by the bursting stonefruit and peep fruit flavors. It somewhat reminds of a dry Muscat wine in its expression. Although dry Muscat never takes on so much depth and complexity.
Sweet spices like nutmeg populate the experience from the mid-palate onwards, while delicate vanilla, toasted hazelnut and caramel add more and more sweetness sensation as the wine develop on your tongue. The acidity is sustained-enough though.
Long, layered and salivating finish that lives your senses delighted from such purity of its ripe fruit expression combined with complex but all-tempting oak, dairy (butter and brioche), and spicy notes. Some might find the acidity at the highest level of minerality, and the finish generous and warming. This is no Burgundy Chardonnay minerality and tension.
Overall
An absolute and rare pleasure of a wine to enjoy for those in search of a dry white with plenty of character and a concentrated sweet-summery-fruit expression. I’m tempted to say that it’s hedonistically perfect to my palate, as I like Southerly whites filled with sun, and sun-filled fruit flavors such as peach and apricot. This one has heaps.
Almost dangerous. It’s so easy to sip and love…
Enjoy 🙂
Please let me know your thoughts