Mouflette (Skunk)

The RVF show in Paris was quite successful with a lot of people. Shows attract more and more amateurs, young people, both men and women, professionals from the industry as well as private, and even journalists working for competing media.

The only “downside” was the obsession the RVF team has concerning alcohol and powerful wines. It made it look like the Evin law turned all journalists into anti - rich wines, unless it is in their perception of Parker’s palate, and possibly even Bettane and Desseauve and their eagerness to be contrarians?

In several French media, and not just in the RVF, I see this anti alcohol trend in wine, without even taking the time to speak about balance or even just to allow other points views to be expressed. This becomes committed journalism and this is disappointing. For myself, of course, and my taste for rich wines, I feel sorry for my friends’ wines, here in Bordeaux or the Roussillon, and it reminds me the sketch of a comedian long gone, Fernand Raynaud: The Candle.
Let me explain, for younger readers: in a family where everyone has a crooked mouth, no one is able to blow out a candle as the air blows off to the side, finally someone gets it but he is abnormal ( in regards to this family) because he doesn’t have a crooked mouth.

It also makes me think about this true story Hervé Bizeul and I experienced with our Canadian distributors friends: in this case, the buyer found that a few wines had a smell of skunk.
Mouflette (a kind of skunk) must smell bad in Canada, as a charming québecoise defines the smell of brett: these aromas are a mix of reduction, mercaptan, smelly poo, or like a friend of mine who loves horses would say, the sweat of a sick horse!
So, anyway, our journalist friends end up liking obvious defects for all those who attended the DUAD with Professor Dubourdieu, for all those competent oenologists trying to make "clean" wine. They like wines with defects (in my opinion) with conviction, because it is the opposite of those wines smelling of new wood, ripe fruit, grapes. Is there a new taste trend for scatology? I do not know.
In any case, with more than 13%, it is picked too late, overripe, today’s taste is brett, vegetal, acidic minerality, transparency ... Stop wines too black!

The new Ku Klux Klan of wine does not like these dark colors! Neither fine new barrels, nor wines which bead a bit in contact with the tongue. After Nouvelle Cuisine and its excesses, new natural wine, it certainly takes all kinds to make the world, having long neglected this type of wine it was time to bring them up back... I will promptly ask my staff to produce a small cuvee for these fans to show our expertise, I should say our know-not-how.