Thursday, November 08, 2012

2010 Gilles Gelin BEAUJOLAIS-VILLAGES (Southern Burgundy, France)

I drank a bottle of the a couple of weeks ago and didn't write about it because I didn't like it.  It seemed overly lean, austere, and dried out.
It must have been an off bottle, because this, my second bottle, was really good.

I think this grower markets his wines under two labels:  Gilles Gelin, and Domaine des Nugues.  I've previously extolled the Domaine des Nugues Beaujolais wines, and this alternate label wine is also terrific.  I'm not sure if they're different cuvees, or just different labels.  Regardless, this wine is fruity, minerally, energetic, soft and very, very lively.

Highly saturated violet-inflected dark ruby.  Unbelievably bright nose of ripe yet vibrantly crisp red fruits (you can actually smell the acids, making your nose tingle) and clean stoniness.  Bright, refreshing, and nicely concentrated in the mouth.  It's the kind of wine that both so cleanly-fruited, ripe, yet crisp that it's hard to get tired of drinking it.  No it's not complex, just ridiculously addictive to drink.  B+/A-.  Imported by Fleet Street Wine Merchants, I got this for $16.99.  Not cheap for a Beaujolais-Villages, but well worth it.

UPDATE:  I've now drunk the last of 6 bottles of this that I had, and the bottle variation was maddening.  3 bottles were fruity and nice, like the bottle described in detail above.  The other three were dried-out, lacking fruit, and hard as industrial steel -- like the first one described in the intro to this post.  This is Russian Roulette in bottles.

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