Tag Archives: pineau d’aunis

Five or so years ago, I was sitting on a gravel patio in Royal Oak with a group of friends when Putnam walked up with a long, slender bottle of sweet, orange wine.  At first, I was appalled: It tasted a little like NutriSweet.  Then he presented a fresher example, and in going back and forth between the two, I discovered how the fruit and floral qualities in the latter changed to what was in the former, and they both became beautiful.

The wine was Les Giroflées, a rose produced from the pineau d’aunis grape by Eric Nicolas of Domaine de Bellevue, and it’s been a favorite ever since.  In the past few years, though, it’s had one major flaw: Nicolas hasn’t been making the damn stuff.

Enter: the 2009 vintage.  Only a few cases made it to the US; only a few of those made it to Michigan; half of one has made it to my house; and one of those bottles is sitting in front of me, open.  Santa came a few weeks early this year.

Aromatically, it has the round, softness of an elegant chenin blanc, but it’s tinted with strawberry.  It’s a soft, fleshy wine with fruit that just explodes on the palate.  I realize now that what I took as NutriSweet initially is an unusual, unique interaction between ripe strawberry flavor and the typical minerality one finds in many Loire Valley wines.  That aroma and sensation of freshly broken stone is the same sharp quality I get in artificial sweeteners, but over the course of really falling in love with this wine, those grew distinct.  I don’t recall this wine historically having as pronounced a bitter quality — almost like unripe fruit — at the finish, but it’s there just a bit, which nicely offsets that off-dry sweetness that I love so much.  There are also some pleasantly tart undertones that linger on the finish after the bottle’s been open an hour or so and warmed up.  Very pleasant wine.

I got my bottle of this little treasure, which weighs in at 13.5% abv, at Everyday Wine in Ann Arbor.