Les Portes de Bordeaux 2009
Les Portes de Bordeaux 2009
Bordeaux, France
The nose of this French red wine contains copious amounts of mocha. Deep, rich blackberry is also present, but the chocolate dominates the nose. It’s very smooth when drinking. You hear the term jammy a lot when talking about wine, and this one fits that bill. I’d describe it as jam-filled like a fig newton. It’s thin for a red wine, but sweet and bready like a newton that’s been chocolate dipped.
Pleasant fruit, pleasant everything. And FYI, it goes remarkably well with chocolate-covered pretzels.
Other Bloggers’ Thoughts:
This Bordeaux has a translucent black-cherry color with almost no legs. . . . There are significant floral notes, and the aroma’s a bit boozy, but nothing is too overpowering, and the fruit notes are almost completely hidden. . . .This Bordeaux is somewhat thin-bodied, which we guessed when we swirled it and saw how nonviscous it was. The first few sips are just alkaline tannins and alcohol (the wine is fairly strong, at 13 percent alcohol by volume.) It gets sweeter, and reveals some sour cherry notes, when it breathes, but this is still a fairly dry wine.
A little mint initially, but after breathing it is lost. Some really nice oak. It then rounds itself off and becomes wonderfully chewy.
The Les Portes de Bordeaux starts out on, smell alone, pretty big. You can smell cherries and fruit and vanilla jumping out of the glass, and the initial tastes are pretty good although mostly one dimensional. I tried it again after about an hour and it got a little more interesting with strawberry coming through the aroma and some pepper, both of which showed up in the mouth. With decent tannins and a nice long finish I thought we might have a winner and I fully expected it to continue to evolve. . . . Sadly that was the extent of its changes. No more depth appeared, no complexity, nothing really special, and after 2 hours it started to lose any of the complexity it already had. For $4.99 it’s what I expected, but not what I hoped. It’s not a terrible drinking wine and probably heads and shoulders above a $2.99 bottle, but if you’re hoping for that real French wine experience, I’m not sure this qualifies.
Reviewed 12 April 12.
Posted: Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 @ 1:16 am
Categories: Wine.
Tags: 2009, bordeaux, cheap wine snops, fig newton, france, french wine, jam, les portes bordeaux, mocha, parched no more, review, tasting notes, vinously, Wine.
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