Camembert: Gourmet Père et Fils

Seems appropriate that this post follows the previous one as it's the same producer and similar unimaginative label.

Another wine that gives very direct guidelines what to eat if you have no idea yourself.

We bought this one together with white Fruit de Mer wine for the same reason, the label looked so bad and price moderate (around 7 euros), so it could not be a good wine. But the score was 3.9 so of course we got curious.

I wanted to drink something with eggplant-tomato-minced tofu sauce. Ideally I imagined something lighter with that dish but as we did not have any lighter reds at home, it had to do.

I discovered again how tedious task is taking nice pictures. I had taken around 20 pictures of the bottle and glasses under different angles and lights when I noticed that my own reflection had been on the bottle all the time. Finally I knelt on the floor to hide myself, took one picture and decided that was acceptable enough.

The wine comes from producer called Gourmet Père et Fils, from Languedoc-Roussillon, South of France. The appellation IGP Pays d’Oc covers wines made in that region.

Camembert is a mix of Syrah and Marselan grapes.

Typically, a warm climate Syrah is full-bodied, high in alcohol, with ripe flavors of ripe cooked black fruit and liquorice.

Allowing the wine to age in oak barrels is common practice for Syrah. It allows to soften the tannins and adds flavors of smoke and spice.

Over time, the best wines can obtain flavors of meat, leather and earth.

Marselan grape is a cross between Cabernet Sauvignon and Grenache grapes.

It adds flavors of cherry and black currant to the wine and has soft tannins.

IGP Pays d’Oc indicates here that the grapes for that wine could have been grown all over the region. 

The wine was clear very deep ruby in colour.

Aromas were pronounced. First things that I smelled were secondary aromas (meaning aromas that are extracted from oak barrels during the maturation and after the fermentation) of vanilla, oak bark and chocolate. After swirling, the aromas got even stronger but now there were also juicy black fruit such as black cherry, blueberry, black currant and black plum notes present. Characteristically for Syrah, there were also pepper and sweet spice aromas.

Flavors were same as aromas. Juicy black fruit dominated with vanilla, cinnamon and pepper notes. Tannins are rather high but soft. For me the wine seems full bodied. Finish (how long the flavors stay strong in the mouth after swallowing) was medium to long.

Due to sweetness, the wine seemed even off-dry, alcohol was high – 14% but it did not appear too strong in palate.

I rated it with 4 as I was really pleased with this wine after thinking that it would be at most 3.4. Let’s not judge a wine according to its label J