Le Meurger
Bourgogne Chard or Pinot!
Somewhere between the early ideals I had regarding the sanctimony of a winemaker using only fruit that he or she grew on property that he or she owned and bottles that he or she blew and cork that he or she harvested from their holdings in Portugal and did the whole damn thing in house and sold it to you personally and that was the best wine ever...and my still sacred ideals about not wanting to sell the mass-produced wine equivalent of fast-food...lies my affection for those who will let fools like me figure out that the former is not reality and the latter is absolutely the grocery store paradigm.
These individuals realize that great wine is grown, not manufactured. They also get that loving hands need to shepherd the juice from its original container (the grape) to the final one (the bottle.) But what they also get is that there is a lot of quality juice out there, and much of it is from vines that are not necessarily located just outside the winemaker's window, adoringly pruned each morning before even the dog gets walked. There are vineyards owned by lots of folks, and those are overseen much of the time by different folks, and the wine made from the fruit is made by someone else altogether.
What matters, my friends, is the provenance and quality of the thing. Is the soil good? Is the fruit good? Is the winemaker good?
If the answer to all these is yes, then really the ideal we should all have is: Is this a wine I can welcome into my life? And these days, respectfully, is it something I can AFFORD to welcome into my life?
Well, with Le Meurger, a label we've worked with ever since I found out it existed, the answer is also an emphatic yes. Le Meurger is a project in the Burgundy area, but also working heavily just south, in Beaujolais, that contracts with growers to buy their grapes that, and I am not kidding here, are perhaps too ripe and bursting with delicious juice.
What? Eric, come on! No, I'm serious. See, a lot of growers try to harvest at times that are perhaps a little early, to retain acid over sugars. Sometimes a grower thinks that the wine he or she would have made from a given parcel will be at a ripeness level that will not contribute to the longevity they seek, or the flavor profile they desire. So they sell the grapes. Or maybe the family that owns the grapes doesn't make wine. They sell the grapes. The point is, my friends at Village Wine, one of my favorite importers, have one of their AMAZING Burgundian winemakers (whose wines they represent) go buy some of this excess fruit, and make affordable wines designed to please at the table while retaining the essence of their home vineyards. So what if the wine won't last 40 years in bottle? It's for tonight. Or six months. So enjoy!
I'm offering both Burgundies, the Blanc (Chardonnay) and the Rouge (Pinot Noir.) Try 'em, grab some. You'll be glad you did.
