Côte-Rotie “Tupin’s” 2014

Color:

Dark purple with light violet reflections

Nose:

Matthieu Barret's "Tupin's" smells dark-fruity, dark-spicy: juniper (berry and wood), wild raspberry to blackberry notes mix with sloes and tart-sweet cherries, a pinch of ethereal black pepper with delicate smoke hovering over flowers, a hint of meat and still dewy forest floor.

Palate:

The first seconds on the palate belong to the velvety, grippy tannin, an almost magical, because "infinitely" elegant acidity, then everything is ethereal-cool fruit, which virtually vibrates in front of a subtle mineral prospectus.

Digression:

There are wines that can hardly or not at all be "approached" with a more or less precise (as little objective as exclusively subjective) stringing together of organoleptic facts. Matthieu Barret's "Tupin's" is one of these wines. In order to do even half justice to what is happening in the glass and on the palate, or to convey the "swell value", lists are not enough (despite all the aesthetics of the list) - so why not still become more associative? In "Tupin's", the steeply terraced slopes of the Côte-Rôtie are transformed into gently rolling hills of a classic Arcadian landscape such as Claude Lorrain might have painted. Juniper, raspberry bushes and blackberry vines play the ivy that overgrows an ancient temple ruin, violets and broom glow in front of a patch of woodland that has just been thrown about with fine brushstrokes, a silvery grey column of smoke divides the tops of the trees as narrowly as the blade of a scalpel. The magical blue of dawn was captured by another painter, Joachim Patinir, more than a century earlier: a bluish veil whose "cool, distant glow" bathes the scenery in a mystical light. One would almost have to become wistful with happiness, if there were not little epiphanies and the "ecstasy of facts" with every sip - this is how a Syrah tastes in the best of all possible worlds.