Some would throw at me, “How much liveliness can you expect from a Grenache?” I understand, am with your angst, I didn’t expect this much persuasive quality either.  In the introduction of palate, you’re greeted by rich, believable, animated fruit and coupled with a concise and softened spice, abiding the texture which I had to sip repeatedly to fully embrace and conceptualize.  One word for this bottle: dulcet.  Certainly a musical revolution and ambrosial arrangement that demands the fixation of senses all.  And with its phenolic entrenchment, it’ll go for years.  Who knows how many.  This writer won’t wait on his, as I was so smitten and stuck in its song, I’m coerced and intellectually reimbursed to again tilt glass–  poetry and speed and slow seduction, a delicious and pivotal dichotomy of rhythm and recital, talking to me and telling the free-spirited Beat in me to keep sipping and sit on the porch and watch life pass, don’t worry, Grenache is meant to be light, swaying and sent in song–  In its truth, it tells you to again sip, and notice how it evolves and changes its instrumentation of flavor bestowal– cherry now, and light reverberant strawberry.  And there, with sip three, or five, I have total enveloping symphony, a euphonious consonance of varying flavor and essence suggestion.

This is not merely a matter of being impressed by a wine or the varietal or the winemaker’s interpretation thereof; it’s what the wine said to me: “This is life, what you sip.  I…  Am. Life.”  And I don’t contest, at all.  And to the skeptics of Grenache, you need this bottle meet!  Be taught something.  Be humbled.  Be bewitched.  Learn something about your “palate” and how you see wine before you again say something about the light but loud Rhône.  Another step lift, and again, I’m taught.  Sip sip……..

MM93

(6/24/15)