Fingers

Iché “Château d’Oupia” 2008 Minervois (Languedoc) – Unlike many previous vintages of this wine…well, actually, all with which I was familiar…this didn’t taste good right out of the gate, or at least no bottle I tried did. As a result, I made two decisions: one good, one potentially bad. The latter was, unfortunately, to go short on cellaring some of this absurdly undervalued wine, because I lacked confidence. The former was to put what little I did have away for a short while. And right now, it’s drinking very prettily (for Minervois) in a way that reminds me of how all the other vintages drank in their first flush of youth. Oh well, my mistake. Here we have meat, baked earth, rosemary stem, and darkness without the overt density that can afflict the wines of the region. There’s structure, though it’s a little tremulous and I do still wonder about the future. The present, however, is very nice. And I’ve already been wrong once about this wine. (4/11)