The Drink Business
byColin Haythe9/19/2023
Philippe Bascaules from Château Margaux is the winemaking director which helps explain some of the elegance and finesse of this stylish white from Inglenook, even if there is none of Margaux’s famous Sauvignon Blanc here. Tasted in Paris just after what, for me, are the two best whites of the entire September hors Bordeaux series could have proved a challenge and I was expecting to redraft my first tasting note. But not so, or at least not significantly. This is an exquisite wine and not quite what I imagined it to be on seeing the assemblage. But Philippe Bascaules’ influence here is very clear. This is supremely lithe and fresh, absolutely bone dry (not often the case with French viognier-based wines today) and very elegant. It’s radiantly bright and sunny (‘solaire’) without any hint of sucrosity. The fruit is very pure – blood orange, mandarin, satsuma, white melon, pink grapefruit, homemade limeade and a glorious note of freshly plucked leafy thyme, a little hint of nettle too and subtlest of dusting of spices. The palate is compact and intense, that intensity reinforced by the fruit remaining tightly bound to a very linear spine and also the inherent salinity of the mineral component here. Long and very focussed, but in fact tapering little towards the finish – it’s more like a gentle fading of a pixilated image as the pixels start to blend together. Very fine indeed.