Note from Stephanie: Just in time for the best part of summer, Balanced Tribe member and blog editor Kathleen Donnelly brings us tasting notes on wines from Beaujolais that are supposed to be perfect for picnics. Are they? Read on.
Is there anything better than a picnic on a summer afternoon, especially if you’ve brought along a comfortable chair and some slightly chilled wine made from Gamay Noir au Jus Blanc?
Light in body, low in alcohol, fruity and flowery, Gamay Noir au Jus Blanc, or just plain Gamay, is one red wine that’s best served slightly chilled. When I decided to hold a picnic and blind tasting on the banks of the Yakima River in Central Washington State, wines made from Gamay seemed the perfect choice.
The Lineup
And so, one Sunday afternoon we settled back in our camp chairs to try four wines. (Not sure what a Wine Tribe is? Take our fun, fast quiz and get wine recos based on your personal palate.) All of the wines we tasted are 100 percent Gamay from Beaujolais:
Jean Paul Brun NV FRV 100 (Beaujolais, $20). Like many winemakers in Beaujolais, Jean Paul Brun uses the grapes’ own yeast to accomplish fermentation and doesn’t add sugars that up the alcohol. The result is a sparkling rosé wine with an alcohol content of only 7.5 percent. Plus, if you say the name out loud in French, it sounds like “effervescent.”
Domaine Dupeuble Pere et Fils 2013 (Beaujolais, $15). All grapes in Beaujolais are picked by hand—it’s how they do things. And it’s how they’ve been doing things at Domaine Dupeuble since the family got the business going in 1512.
Fabien Collonge 2014 L’Aurore de Cotes (Chirobles, $15). Wine Enthusiast magazine gave this affordable red a rating of 89. From the Chirobles appellation, it’s a Cru wine, which, bottom line, means it’s from vineyards more highly regarded than non-Cru.
M. Lapierre 2015 Raisin Gaulois (Vin de France, $16). This one comes from the winery of Marcel Lapierre, a famed Beaujolais winemaker whose son and daughter took over the family business when their father passed away earlier this decade. Its U.S. importer, the well-regarded Kermit Lynch, points out the grapes are almost entirely from the much-admired Morgon appellation.
The Results
Our setting might have been rustic, but we still followed My Wine Tribe’s rules: Tasters didn’t know the identity of the wines and we tried each of them twice—first without and then with food. We began with Jean Paul Brun FRV 100, which everyone, no matter their tribe, described this way: “sweet strawberries.” Some went farther: “strawberry wine cooler,” said one cringing member of the Developed Tribe. “Wild Cherry Lifesavers,” sniffed another. This wine just couldn’t catch a break with the Developed Tribe, whose members rated it lowest of the four we tried. The Balanced and Complex Tribes were not much more charitable, with the exception of two tasters—one Balanced and one Complex—who both admitted they have a sweet tooth and enjoyed this wine as an aperitif. It’s unfortunate that we had no Accessible Tribe members with us because they may well have found a winner in this pretty, fruity, fizzy wine.
The character of our second wine couldn’t have been much more different from the Jean Paul Brun selection, but that didn’t help it with our tasters. The Tribe as a whole found the Domaine Dupeuble very dry, even tart, and if they didn’t go for sweet, they weren’t excited by sour either. Without food, the Balanced Tribe detected wood in both aroma and flavor; with food, they picked up pepper and plum flavors. The Developed Tribe found both aromas and flavors nearly too light to comment on, aside from mentioning an unpalatable-sounding combination of butter and bug spray. One member of the Complex Tribe noted a whiff of sweaty socks. When all was said and done, Tribe members tolerated this wine. They didn’t love it.
Is Beer the Beverage of Summer?
As I eased out the cork on wine no. 3, I noticed several members of the Tribe had begun sneaking looks at the beer cooler. Thank goodness Fabien Collonge didn’t let me down. Both the Balanced and the Developed Tribes chose this wine as their favorite, especially with food. The Balanced found flavors of cedar and cherries, peppercorns and plums. The Developed added raspberries, grapefruit peel and mineral to the list. Meanwhile, the Complex were split over this one, though nobody was terribly enthusiastic. Either they liked the wine well enough with food, or, as with the wines we had tasted so far, this just wasn’t a palate pleaser for them.
Somewhat relieved, I unscrewed the cap on wine no. 4, the M. Lapierre 2015 Raisin Gaulois. Again, the Balanced and Developed Tribe members found themselves in agreement: This was their second favorite wine and they wanted it with food. They liked the aromas and flavors of cherry, cloves, white pepper and pomegranate. The Complex Tribe, whose members in general favor more complexity, again found the wine too light for their taste.
Bottom Line
Somewhere between wines 2 and 3, our picnic group began musing on the much-discussed but hard-to-prove theory that American and European tastes in wine are fundamentally different. Americans are supposed to favor sweeter, bolder flavors that they can enjoy without food. Europeans, who mainly drink their wine with meals, supposedly go for drier, more tannic and acidic wines that cut through the richness of their cuisine. Maybe. While our all-American Tribe members found something to enjoy in the wines we tasted, based on this small sampling Gamay will not be the first-pick grape for our next picnic. The good news is we’ll just have to get our camp chairs out and try again.
Cheers!