Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières red

Last week one of the colleagues asked me for a bottle of wine we tasted on the wine event on the Argentina and Chili at work as he was organizing a wine tasting for a few of his friends at home.

Unfortunately I was out of Trapiche's Broquel Malbec, but we settled for the other (affordable) winner of the evening, being Echeveria's Reserva Syrah/Carmenere.

What does all this have to do with this Côtes du Rhône Villages Chusclan Les Ribières of the title ? In fact I got that one in return for the Echeveria :-)

When I returned home that evening and showed the bottle there was no stopping us from trying it immediately. It was very good (but it required some food, in the form of some toast and tapenade that we always have in house) .

Some tasting notes:

Very nice deep colored, still looking quite young (purple-ish). The aroma was very special with the vanilla of the oak barrels very much present but at the same time some leather and some minerals were also fighting very hard to gain access to the nose.

With respect to taste there were still a whole lot of tannins (in fact a bit too much in the beginning), but thanks to the also strong acidity of the wine everything was in good balance.