Thursday, November 7, 2013

Domaine Charbonnier 2011 Côt, Touraine, Loire Valley

Where, oh where has your awesomeness gone? Not that long ago I reviewed the 2010 Domaine Charbonnier 2010 Côt and deemed it an accessible wine with some jazziness.

I liked it so much that I ordered three bottles of the 2011 vintage online. Green Dragon and I uncorked a bottle recently. We were underwhelmed.

Côt (pronounced COH) is the term used in some parts of France for the Malbec grape. This bottle comes from the Loire Valley, which has some nice soft and juicy red wines. Usually you can expect a casual sipper that doesn’t need a whole lot of bottle aging because the tannins are very loose.

But there’s a difference between having a light body and having no structure at all. Green Dragon took one sipped and proclaimed it as “not awesome.”

I wasn’t ready to write it off – especially since I had two other bottles downstairs that she still doesn’t know about. So I sniffed… and I swirled… and I swished. Unfortunately, the outcome didn’t change much.

There are some floating flavors of black cherry and smokiness, but there wasn’t really anything to dig into. This is a bright and light wine, very different from the fruit forward richness of an Argentinian Malbec.

I’m going to let the other two bottles rest for a year or more before I sample them. This wine needs time or maybe just a tannin transfusion. I’m still liking the Loire, but this bottle missed the mark.

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Rating: 1.5 of 5  Value: 2 of 5
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