Les Welcome
Whether by intent or tragic mis-typing, you’ve landed on the home of Les Garagistes winery collective. If you’re new to our dark cabal, a rich and heady stew of bad French grammar and subterranean winemaking awaits. But where to start? Here are a few suggestions:
- First, you might take a quick stroll through last year’s vintage escapades, accumulated over the two critical months of September 2009 and October 2009 (remember that the posts are presented with the earliest at the bottom of the page).
- Then, who are these Garagistes and where do they get off? And didn’t I hear they were dead?
- Winehenge: the movie. If that’s not enough to get you to click…
- A French oak barrel primer
- Red, Rex Sox (Yankees fans, be forewarned)
- Plastic capsules and why we switched to paper
- 2009 Blending Trials: we go for the decimals!
- Lastly, mourn with the Moody Blues as they appear to lament the end of a Les Garagistes harvest.
Thanks much for stopping by. We’ve got fruit lined up for 2010 — with new varietals ensuring we’ll be making even more up as we go along — so another exciting vintage is just ahead. Hope you can join us for it, and let us know what you think of what we’ve cobbled together.
2001 Les G Klipsun Merlot
The other night I opened one of the few bottles I have left of our 2001 Klipsun Vineyard Merlot. In point of fact, it’s actually 92% merlot, augmented with a bustier of 8% Klipsun cabernet from the previous year. I remember it being… ample in its youth, but boys, I’m here to tell you she can still make your heart race.
Klipsun Vineyard inclines down a sun-baked hill in the Red Mountain AVA near Richland, Washington, supplying grapes to heavy hitters like Quilceda Creek, DeLille, Andrew Rich and — until they got wise — us.
Seven years later, the merlot from those shapely slopes still had curvaceous curves. Cedar and tobacco leaf wrapped around deep, floral fruit, forming a veritable Robusto of a nose. In the mouth, not quite as spectacular, but increasingly complex over the hour we drank it. Lovely, high thread-count, emery board tannins, more or less balanced with gobs of lush fruit — man, I’d forego my bailout-funded $18 million outhouse remodel if I could achieve that texture every year.
After all that, there wasn’t much in the way of a finish, sadly, but the ride was so thrilling it’s hard to complain too much. It really reminded me of the merlot we got from Horse Heaven this year, so even though the 2001′s nearly gone, perhaps this year’s model will take us around the track once again.
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