Sunday, June 24, 2012

2010 Pelee Island Baco Noir (Ontario VQA)

$10.95 on general list at the LCBO. 12.5% alc./vol. Compressed-particle, natural-cork closure (I think a screw cap would be better).

This opens with a very typical leafy / peppercorn / brackish / raisiny Baco aroma. With a couple of hours of aeration, the raisiny quality becomes more pronounced and the wine now shows some bright raspberry character. Suprisingly tart on the entry (2010 was a hot vintage in Ontario). Sour redcurrant fruit, with a rounded sourness to the mid-palate and a soft core. A bit odd, and not in line with what I expected from the vintage.

Given this, I tried an old trick that worked really well in the past: I refrigerated the rest of the wine overnight. On the following day I poured a glass cold, and let it slowly warm up. Now, some torrefied character came through on the nose. The palate, however, was much improved from the previous day: although the wine was still zingy, there was a certain density to it when sipped cold, that seemed to round it out a bit more. Some diminutive fuzzy tannin and a bit of warmth rounded out the finish.

I always used to say that Foch was more funky than Baco, but that Foch had better acid / tannin balance.

I still believe this to be true.

Baco can surprise you with acidity that's aggressive and unbalanced. What's really strange about it is that more often than not, you'll find this to be the case in hot, rather than cool, vintages...

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