Red Wine with Fish

I am a Pinot drinker. Even the bigger ones tend to be lighter bodied than any other red wine (Beaujolais excepted). They go great with most foods and can be consumed all year round. I love them. So when I have to find something from the Rhone, I am a little at sea.

Buying this Bila-Haut was a little bit like playing darts with a blind-fold. I was at a wine shop, which will go nameless, which has a good selection of not-that-hard-to-find, high-end wines for a little more than you really should pay for their Burgundy tasting and because I was afraid WBW was two weeks ago, I grabbed this bottle, one of the few Languedoc-Roussillons they carry. So the odds were against something transcendent. Luckily, I am too sloppy to play the odds.

This wine was marvelous. The nose was black berry and dark cherry; hints of fig and an underlying current of bacon fat (sort of like a Cote Rotie on steroids); cocoa and wet pavement (thanks to Sydney for that great descriptor). The palate was huge with bacon, plum and cedar. The long, long finish was fig and bittersweet chocolate. And the texture: wow! big and velvety. This is a monster wine.

Apparently this is an M. Chapoutier which shows up nowhere on the bottle. Just the comment “… a well known Rhone producer has transformed his magic to the Languedoc and created a wine with finesse.”

Finesse? Well I guess so. This wine has layer upon layer of flavors and while it was a bit like getting hit in the face with a piece of wood, this was one ornate and delicate piece of wood.

So, I see you can have power and elegance in one package. I am going to have to broaden my thinking about the warm weather varietals. I don’t think Pinot will ever cease to be my favorite, but I may be adding more favorites. The problem with wine, is that the more I learn… the more I want to learn more.

Update by request: this wine retailed for $23 but I think you can get it considerably cheaper.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Wine, Wine Blogging Wednesday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.