Decided to pull a Bordeaux for dinner tonight, nothing very expensive but on the other hand something I figured would be ready. This offering came from an Yvon Mau wooden box set a few holiday seasons back that the LCBO offered (similar to this one). Yvon Mau is a Bordeaux and wine marketing and producing company. With the merger in 2001 of Yvon Mau and Freixenet, the new entity is the world’s ninth largest wine producer, and a great part of this comes from marketing/producing little estates like Michel Séral’s. When bundled together you tend to get 4 to 6 bottles of small-house wine from Bordeaux that can generally impress you for the price. Averaging out to be $15-20 you can consider this a good bargain with the added bonus of the complete unknown. Let’s jump to the tasting notes shall we?
Young and lively, those are the first impressions! After a couple of years on it’s side the sediment was visible and required decanting producing a solid nose of deep cherry and caramel with a ruby red colour. The first few swirls and slurps led to vanilla taking over from the caramel and cherry remaining evident with hints of plum. As the wine opened up the cherry yielded entirely to plum, tabacco and cedar, quite a change from the initial spectrum. The wine is decently balanced, may weighed a tad heavier on the front end, and with a shorter finish then was expected. Overall the wine is a professional offering that does not detract from a meal or hinder drinking it on it’s own. On the other hand it is by no stretch of the imagination anything more then a run of the mill Grand Vin. You get what you pay for in this bottle, decent French winemaking but not outstanding or memorable.
The CWGSR is 84 out of 100
