Domaine Monplezy Emocion 2021
Grapes: Marsanne, Roussane
Looks: Straw yellow
On the nose: Tons of minerals: slate, chalk, yoghurt, gooseberry, lemon lime (Sprite), salted capers, whiff of smoke, fresh paper.
On the palate: Candied lemon, chalk, Welch’s grape juice, cedar, gold apple. Intense flavors. Round in texture with oily mouthfeel, lots of body. Relatively lower acid compared to body (but not low). Easy to drink
Price point: 26 EUR / Not sold in Norway
Terningkast: 5/6
There is no worse gift than wine that you don’t want to drink, and no better gift than wine that you did not expect to have the opportunity to. Domaine Monplezy’s Emocion fell into the latter category.
We met up with my brother-in-law yesterday to do a Spring refresh of their father’s grave, watch Aston Villa (my team) and Manchester United (his team), catch up, and eat some dinner. What I didn’t expect is for him to bring this bottle with him. He worked at the vineyard a few years back and tends to visit when he gets the chance and bring some bottles back to Norway, where the wine is not yet imported for sale. He had talked a lot about this producer and the wines, but you never really know if the wines are actually good when someone worked at a vineyard. It’s a normal job; you can get brainwashed.
Anyway tasting a wine in such circumstances, where you genuinely have no idea what to expect, is among my favorite opportunities—and it’s taken to another level if the wine is actually good (rare). So much of wine drinking, like life, is built around building expectations and either having them affirmed or denied, especially in the modern market. Having the chance to taste something free of those associations, build-up, and the greater “is it worth it?” context is a rare pleasure. One receives the freedom to just taste and think associatively, connecting taste to grapes, and wines, and experiences one has enjoyed before. I know this sounds trite and bullshit adjacent, but it is honestly what I hope to do when I taste a wine.
This rare pleasure is further enhanced in this case because the wine is from the Languedoc. If you ask a bottle shop employee where the value is to be found in French wine, a chorus of annoying sommeliers rise up behind them as an acapella group in in varying timbres chanting “Languedoc-Roussilon”. Yet this same chorus disappears whenever you actually need help to sort between quality and swill. This area—between Andorra and Marseille—is where the majority of French wine is grown, yet wine drinkers know relatively nothing about the towns, geography, soils, grapes, and styles. When you think about the triumph in branding that a tiny town like Gevrey-Chambertin has had in making it’s specific style of wine known worldwide, it’s all the more striking that I knew absolutely nothing about what a IGP Cotes de Thongue wine was supposed to taste like. And I did not expect something so complex, round, yet bracingly drinkable, fresh, and refreshing as this. A big chapeau to him for bringing it over for us to taste!
When I tasted it at first I was like “does this have viognier in it?”, because of the distinct oily texture, but that of course comes from the Roussane, which has a very similar mouthfeel to viognier. When a wine has just fruit, I find that this oily character can make the wine feel a bit one note and cloying. However, Domaine Monplezy’s Emocion brings an insane amount of minerality (we’re talking Vichy Catalan levels of chalk and slate) to the table to provide complexity and a “bracingness” that I keep coming back to. Like with mineral water or a good chasselas, the minerality here “finishes the sip”, cleansing the palate of the fruit and the oil and preparing it for the next. This staged structure allows the drinker to enjoy its components in order, without getting tired of them.
Returning to the issue of Languedoc branding: these factors are created by artful growing on a great site, which has a combination of base limestone and shallow sand soils. You could not produce the minerality that carries this wine on a random plot. And as a regular guy in a store, I would have absolutely no clue about these differentiators. While their effects were detectable as I tasted the wine and confirmed in doing a bit of research, the hardest part of selling wines is not getting the consumer to “understand them” when they’re drinking, it’s to get them off the shelf in the store. In these cases having a sherpa, someone who brings you a wine from a lesser excavated region that means something to them and shares it with you, is invaluable and too seldom in my life. I suppose this is my soap box plea, then, for you, the armchair sherpa, to share more alien wines with your friends and family. It is an exchange richly enjoyed by all.
