The 'Grand Cru' You've never heard of
2018 Dufes Successeurs, Langlade
November 22, 2024
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The label is plain but the wine is not. It’s likable at first taste, full in the mouth with generous fruit accented with evocative herbal notes. It’s very satisfying, a wine that will be appreciated by a range of people, from casual drinkers to connoisseurs.
In the Middle Ages, the small Languedoc town of Langlade was considered a grand cru on the burgundy level. Connoisseurs from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson loved it. But phylloxera destroyed its vineyards in the 19th century. A Franco-American woman, Elisabeth van der Bent, is working to restore its reputation. Her wine is made mainly from Rhone grapes but drinks more like a mellowed cross between a Rhone and St. Emilion. Experienced tasters have compared it to both. Rhone and Bordeaux. It’s extraordinary and worth far more than its price.
Noted English critic Jancis Robinson ore eloquently enthused:
“This extraordinary wine with its carmine-cherry fruit and cello-curving texture is only 12.5% alcohol when it tastes of the richness of a wine with much more. I say extraordinary because it's rare that I taste a 12.5% red wine with so much depth and timbre. It's wild strawberries and sweet loamy earth pressed into hidden contours. It's unutterably gentle but with an almost stubborn, essential sense of self. The tannins prickle static-soft and precise through the circular grooves of the fruit, making it sing, the way that an elliptical stylus runs the grooves on vinyl, making it sing. The music has warmth; an analogue softness and kindness that draws you in. I'll say for the third time: it's extraordinary.
I'd pay £50 for a wine like this. Very Good Value "
Color: medium dark; Aroma: very fine herbal dense, spicy with wood elegant, spicy wood; Mouth: smooth, elegant, clean, bright, light and lithe, fine tannins, long, very fresh, creamy in texture and supple; Very Good - Excellent $29.99; Case, $25.49
Len Rothenberg
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