Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Les Charmes 2009

Thanks to Jeremy Pringle (of Wine Will Eat Itself) for sharing this with me. I believe it’s imported by Eurocentric.

The nose is complex and mostly savoury. As it unfolds, there are notes of unripe banana, some pretty fermentation esters, raspberry-flavoured boiled lollies and ripe, juicy weeds. The fruit character in particular seems to slip around with each sip, modulating between medicinal and sharply sugared. As it warms, a stronger thread of vegetation lifts above the fruitier, prettier dimensions, the whole becoming thicker, headier, more intoxicatingly perfumed. It ends up a really striking aroma profile, both comforting and sharp, like a warm jumper laced with thorns.

In the mouth, sharp and cool on entry, showing prominent acid which is well integrated into the flavour and flow of the wine. The fruit’s medicinal character comes to the fore here, and it’s surrounded by an array of complexities like banana skins and twigs. Weight-wise, this is lean the way a model is lean, not ungenerous so much as elegant in a highly particular, angular way. The after palate is the most fruit-driven point of the wine’s line, with more boiled lollies and the beginnings of a dry, raspy tannic influence that carries through the finish. Its tannins are worth lingering over. One might describe them as slightly green, though for me they are rough in a more positive sense, in the same way a banana that’s not quite ready to eat has that curiously powdery effect on one’s tongue.

A really fabulous wine whose complexity is especially remarkable given it sees no oak and is so young. Great value at $A30.

Domaine Jean-Marc Burgaud
Price: $A30
Closure: Cork
Source: Gift

Château Thivin Côte de Brouilly 2006

This color seems wrong: too deep, too rich, too red. Surely it can’t be Beaujolais, can it? There it is, though, that telltale bright purple rim, something out of the effects department from Twilight; it’s impossibly young and is, I suppose, a market of an “unserious” wine (as would Carignane as well).However! This isn’t your ordinary banana-scented Beaujolais that someone brought home from last November’s sales; sure, there’s just a hint of that tropical fruitiness that carbonic maceration seems to produce, but it’s also much more at Burgundy than Beaujolais, somehow. To me, it smells of black pepper, balsamic vinegar, strawberries: dessert-y, sure, but also somehow very sophisticated. There’s also a sort of leathery component which makes me wonder if this wine has seen oak at some point; it seems relatively complex.Nicely tannic at the edges, the wine uncoils from its mineral depths and into a very fine, well judged middle-weight palate that delivers strawberries and cream with a sassy acid backdrop, allowing the fruit in the foreground to truly shine. It all finishes on a very bright, grapey note that reminds me of pears poached in a port wine sauce: lovely dark fruits seamlessly mixed with fresh produce from a spring garden.To me, this wine is utterly delightful: it seems to exist at that magical interstice between unserious and very, very serious. This isn’t supposed to be a grape worth paying attention to, but treated sensitively, as this wine is? It’s a rare treat.Château Thivin
Price: $20
Closure: Cork