Clos des Menuts 2008, St Emilion Grand Cru

On our recent visit to Bergerac, we took a day out at St Emilion, town of breakneck pavements of tiny cobbled streets on big hills and massive amounts of wineries. Whilst there we visited Clos des Menuts which had a beautiful cellar that you could take a little amble around. I don’t think I could ever get bored of visiting wineries, cellars, vineyards or any home of wine-type wine thinks and stuff. I’ve probably read about the wine making method about 1000 times now. It’s a good job The Boy is so patient with me and puts up with it all without complaint.

I loved the cellar at Clos des Menuts because it had all of these lovely (and some quite funny) carvings in the wall and also they had a fab and totally over the top stained glass window. I liked the complete pointlessness of it all. It’s fab and unecessary.

Clos des Menuts
St Emilion Grand Cru, 2008

A light colour, with a slight tawny ring from the aging. It was fruity and sweet with something like a light marzipan hint on the nose, which I thought was lovely.

The flavours in the mouth had an overwhelming blackberry flavour and was easy drinking and mellow. It is at the perfect age to drink right now – the tannins have mellowed out beautifully but there is still a pleasing astringency in the mouth and slight drying on the back of the mouth.

The afternose has a whiff of black cherry about it and also slightly vegetal aromas. It was the most well balanced and interesting of the red wines that we tasted in St Emilion. Lovely.