2018 Les Genoux
- Retail
- £50.00
- Member
- £40.00
- Case
- £300.00
- Case (Member)
- £240.00
- Varieties
- Grenache Noir
- Carignan
- Grenache Gris
- Grenache Blanc
- Vintage
- 2018
- Country
- France
- Region
- Roussillon
- Alcohol
- 13.5%
- Bottle size
- 750 mL
- Drinking Window
- 2020 - 2030
- Description
This is our rare, single-vineyard wine, which is only produced in the best years, and in 2018 only 967 bottles were produced. This year is even lighter and more delicate than usual
- Eyes
Les Genoux is less intensely coloured than the regular cuveé, as it contains 10-15% white and pink grapes.
- Nose
The nose is more complex that our main wine and is more perfumed, spicy and delicate. This year's use of a brand new 'Icone' barrel - Seguin Moreau's top-of-the-range longer-seasoned French oak has imparted a richer, more generously vanilla-y nose than normal, but we still find the same layers of raspberry and wild strawberry, with wafts of rosemary and fennel. There's also hints of slatey minerals and even a note of iodine.
- Mouth
Initially soft, and quite shy the palate slowly unveils an array of delicate red fruits like wild strawberries and red fruit pastilles. The gentle vanillas, and subtle seasoned oak cushion a delicate almost Pinot/Tempranillo fruit, and echoes of garrigue herbs and fennel keep intriguing a palate of surprising length and complexity.
- Body
medium
- Winemaking Notes
The source of the fruit for our 'Les Genoux' cuveé are the wonderful 100+ year-old vines in our ancient Coume de Roy vineyard. All the grapes are picked by hand, and any selection needed to eliminate less than perfect grapes is done in the vineyard. This year we ended up with five demi-muids (500 L barrels) up-ended with the ends taken out. Two of them were filled with whole bunches, crushed under-foot, and plunged gently by hand, twice or three times a day, during the fermentation. At pressing, the wine was drained into a single 500L Seguin Moreau 'Icone' barrel, and the pressings blended with other Grenache pressings in a 225L barrel. After 18 months of ageing, the 500L Icone, and the 225L pressings barrel were blended together to create the Les Genoux cuvée.
- Growing Conditions
After a cool start to the year, a heat spike in May ensured a good flowering, and then a long dry period in July, August and September meant that we harvested a good yield of lovely ripe grapes in early October, and our last block from the Coume de Roy picked a few days after the first rain, but just before the heavens opened on the 14th October.
- Food Pairing
Excellent on its own as a 'vino di meditazione' (best appreciated with a good friend), Les Genoux is also a wonderful match for charcuterie (especially finnochiona, or fennel salami), and the perfumed, elegant style makes it pretty versatile.
Reviews
Rosemary George MW
Taste Languedoc - Professional
https://tastelanguedoc.blogspot.com/2020/07/domaine-of-bee-their-latest-wines.html
July 17, 2020 8:00The colour is lighter than the domaine wine. And the wine is altogether more elegant and subtle, in other words Grenache at its most elegant, with delicate red fruit and silky tannins. The oak is very well-integrated and the flavours very harmonious. A lovely glass of wine.
Tamlyn Currin
JancisRobinson.com - Professional
https://www.jancisrobinson.com/tastings
July 19, 2020 23:00Incredible perfume! Rose petals, potpourri, mallow blossom, wild strawberries. Stunning nose. I could smell this all day. And everytime you lift it to your nose, there is something else there. Now I’m getting a little bit of just baked ginger cookies. Fills the mouth with headily fragrant wild strawberries and rose hips. Rooibos tea and very, very delicate spices, as if they’d been brushed onto the fruit with a feather. Ground ginger, white pepper. A heart-breakingly beautiful wine. Soars. And has lots of time ahead of it.
18
Tom Cannavan
Tom Cannavan's Wine Pages - Professional
https://wine-pages.com/tasting-articles/in-the-domaine-of-the-bee/
June 7, 2021 19:15There is lightness and airiness on the nose here, definitely some floral lift and lighter, more raspberry-like fruit, but underpinning is a graphite mineral sense of concentration. In the mouth it is supple and delicious, salty and ozoney, with raspberry pip tartness and a fine framework of tannin and acid that suggest a bit of longevity. It is, however, delicious now, and both powerfully concentrated and juicy to the end.
94
Tamlyn Currin
www.jancisrobinson.com - Professional
www.jancisrobinson.comTasted from a mini sample bottle. 70% Grenache, 20% Carignan, 5% Grenache Gris, 5% Grenache Blanc. 628 bottles made.
Almost Nebbiolo-like in its rose-petalled, rain-soaked-terracotta, dust-roads-lined-with-sour-cherry-trees poignancy – the wine strums at your bones and spaces in your being with an almost haunting insistence. The tannins feel like the curve of a cello, the finish has a gingery bite. Heartbreakingly beautiful. (TC)
14.5% Drink 2022–2030 £45
18
Comments
An elegant wine with a lovely spiced nose. We love it!
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