2010 - Morgon, Terres Dorees (Jean-Paul Brun)

The Terre Dorees 2010 Moulin-a-Vent – half of which spent time in older barriques – features sour cherry, red raspberry, and rose hip along with a nip of horseradish. Lean and bright where I would have expected a bit more richness and sheer sweetness of fruit, it nonetheless finishes with saliva-inducing salinity and invigoration of berry skin, an appellation-typical suggestion of beef marrow emerging understatedly with aeration. A fine-grained suffusion of tannin may yet prove useful as one follows this for the next several years. Given that I tasted this only three weeks after bottling, it’s important to give it the benefit of some doubt; and I regret that I could not revisit it before going to press. Jean-Paul Brun and his Terres Dorees – for a bit more background on which, consult especially my report in issue 184 – continue to be the source of some of Beaujolais’s most exciting wines and best values. “I’m very content with my 2010s,” remarks Burn, but I suspect most lovers of Beaujolais will express their enthusiasm with less restraint. (Brun’s Pinot Noir, Chardonnay “Vinification Bourguignon,” and Roussanne were all still in the midst of their elevage when I visited with him and were not tasted.) Imported by Louis/Dressner Selections, New York, NY; tel. (212) 334-8191