La Milliere

P

Peter Creasey

Peter Creasey
Not a wine I know anything about...

Domaine La Milliere Vieilles Vignes Chateauneuf-du-Pape '05 -- inky red, brawny bouquet, dark fruits, rather simple disjointed make-up, big and forward, some alcohol, might not show improvement with time. [G -VG]

Served with grilled steak, green peas, and mushroom salad.

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. . . . . Pete
 
Pavel, you can't go by my amateurish "tasting notes". I thought about asking what "garrigue" is, but then feared you might think it was a serious question.

. . . . Pete
 
Initial reviews of this wine were all very flattering, but also, reading between the lines, very drink-me-now. I guess Age 19 is not in bounds for "now".
 
It's been around for awhile. Parker spotlighted the 03 vintage (surprise! surprise!). It makes (or at least did until the last vintage I tasted, 2010) traditional wine. It won't make you give up Charvin or VT, but it's a nice wine and was less expensive then most in the aughts. And it does age nicely. I stopped buying it when I started trying to decrease my acquisitions and cut myself down to my 5 0r 6 preferred domaines.

To lay this garrigue business to bed--garrigue is French for scrub brush. In Provence, the scrub is largely wild growing thyme, rosemary, sage and lavender. Put a bunch of those herbs in your hands and crush them and you'll get what garrigue smells like.I must be less sensitives then Mark, because I only smell it from those parts of the D8 that have forest and/or brush near by. If you hike, though, it will fill your nose. As might be expected, wines that are planted near a lot of the scrub have a nose that might, with a leap, be described as smelling--and therefore tasting--of those herbs. How much this is a matter of suggestion, I wouldn't want to say. But I do get it in a lot of Rhone wines.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
It's been around for awhile. Parker spotlighted the 03 vintage (surprise! surprise!).
Click to expand...

serious question (a novelty coming from me in these threads)

while not well-versed in this geographical area, it struck me on a few occasions that some surprisingly tasty (if not classic) stuff was produced in '03 provided it was mostly if not all grenache.
could it be that absence of syrah and mourvedre was a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for achieving any sort of success in CdP in this freakish year?
unfortunately i don't recall the exact cuvee, but a bottle of '03 from monpertuis that was all-grenache stands out in memory as particularly delicious - as much as anything from france in the early going(*)

(*) i've had some shockingly worthy red burgundy more recently but they are tannic as shit
 
Theoretically, Mourvedre should do well in heat as its a late ripening grape. Syrah really should only be a blending grape in the South. In the heat, it turn thick and chocalatey--if you like that kind of thing.

I know almost nothing about Monpertuis except that Doghead got into trouble with Parker over it. The quality of wine in 2003 had more to do with how the winemaker handled the heat. This was the year of Cambie's breakout and many of the wines that made the headlines were in his style and leaned into the heat, making the monstrosities that garnered the headlines. Others not so much. In the end, though, it was the vintage it was, and no one escaped its touch. It was not simply cartoonish, like many of the 07s, but it was exaggerated. They aged decently, but they didn't age into something different. In my opinion, wine rarely does. I've always had a fondness for the ones I had a fondness for and not for others.
 
We have had hotter summers than 2003 since then and droughts that are at least as bad. Why 2003 and 2007 wines were particularly affected needs more research it won't get, given the heat wave drought years that followed. But if mourvedre couldn't survive drought, its use would have surely diminished in the last 20 years and Beaucastel, which was seriously affected by their cleaning up the cellars in the late 90's, would be an even more different wine now. I don't know how to explain the weirdness of 2007, but I sometimes wonder if 03 wasn't merely part of the shape of things to come.
 
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