2007 Coteaux du Languedoc Prestige Rouge

The Puech-Haut 2007 Coteaux du Languedoc Saint-Drezery – a barrique-raised, roughly 60:40 blend of Syrah and Grenache, tasted assembled from barrel – smells of high-toned, ripe black raspberry, vanilla, and cocoa powder. The palate is sumptuous as befits its display of baked and confectionary black fruits, cocoa, coffee, and the vanilla harbors abundant but fine tannins. Sweetly rich and distinctly marked by the spice and vanilla of toasted oak, the finish here is long, with a slight herbal shading, but as yet not terribly complex. It seems structured for half a dozen or more years of cellaring. Gerard Bru employs oenologist Claude Gros and – at least for a time – numbered Michel Roland among his consultants. This might strike most proprietors as over-kill. And that is also how I am tempted to describe some of the more ambitious cuvees that emerge from his showy cellar and 250 acres of vines near Saint-Drezery and at the southeastern edge of the Pic Saint-Loup sub-appellation. Imported by Jeffrey Davies Signature Selections, Bordeaux; tel. 011 33 556 081 954