Undaunted by the task of updating her million-word Oxford Companion to Wine this summer, the redoubtable and wholly admirable Jancis Robinson MW applied her free evenings to tasting a number of wines from the Languedoc, whose high-altitude vineyards are the “source of some of the best value wines in the world”. The Panman family, she said on her Purple Pages, goes from “strength to strength”, making wines with fine acidity that are “great candidates for ageing as well as admirable drinks.”
The highest scorer was our “razor sharp and super sleek” chardonnay, Odyssée. “You’d quite happily pay twice as much if it said Puligny on the label” she said.
The ‘really crystalline’ chenin blanc, Dédicace is “a particularly lissome rendition”, which shows all the true characteristics of that grape variety, while the “pure and super clean” mauzac, Occitania, is a “wonderfully precise textbook example of Mauzac Blanc.”
Of the blends of these three varieties, she noted the “great presence and persistence” of La Trilogie, while the “finely etched” Le Limoux is a “crisp mountain wine”.
A few weeks after this review, she included our late harvest chenin blanc, Lagremas d’Aur 2012 in her selection of Vouvray tasting notes, which can be found here.
