Salut/Hi David Rheault,
le/on Mon, 8 Dec 2003 11:20:50 -0500, tu disais/you said:-
Yes. But the best need long ageing. The grape variety used (Tannat) is well named!
When badly made they can be astringent to the point of acrid. Not all are made for very long ageing, and some of these are perfectly decent when drunk young - at about 3-4 years old. There are some co-op examples that I get at our local wine shop that I use both for cooking and fir drinking with the meal. Dishes like salmis and civet both need quite young tannic wines when you cook with them, and Madiran does excellently well.
that grape elsewhere except for a few
Exactly.
obtainable in the US.
I don't think any Madiran is particularly easy to find outside SW france, and the best , of which Montus Prestige and Bouscassé Vieilles Vignes spring to mind) are in such short supply that they are sold on allocation with Brumont's other wines. Apart from him and his wines, which - like say Mas Daumas (sp?) in Languedoc - benefit from superb media exposure, there are quite a number of other class producers.
Jean-Marc Laffitte - Ch Laffitte-Teston and Patrick Ducournau at Dom Mouréou
- he it was that invented micro- oxygenation. He believes that Tannat based wines are so tannic that to get them drinkable earlier they need air, but he rejects the idea of repeated decanting from barrel to barrel as being to "rough" on the wines. What he thinks of the widespread adoption of his methods for wines from less aggressive vines than Tannat is unrecorded.