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