All Along the Watertowers

Greetings I am now in New Orleans. If you check in previous posts I ventured to Montreal to find le vin rouge. That wine was brooding, and sausagey - lo and behold I’ve found the fermented here in New Orleans to be decadent and overly soapy.

In previous debacles in the world of wine I was fronted with MERLOT: what makes something merlot? Where does it come from...and in the traditional French motif, what does it taste like?

Here I am posing the Dom. Brumont Cotes de Gascogne Rouge -

Gascogny is in southern France, about 100miles from Bordeaux. It is a region of Cognac grapes and sits adjacent to the Atlantic. It’s always interesting to note the color of the actual wine. But surrounding our element here is a lot of the nature of Merlot: la mer. The ocean, blue. The wine itself was creamy-dry, thin and cuttingly suave; tinted with dark berry because it is a blend with a regional grape ‘Tannat.’

Driving to New Orleans, I wondered profusely about the quality of the water in these parts of the far South. At every juncture along the byways and country roads are a water towers. I left New York because it seemed like just one lonely (albeit famous) port in this massive green.blue planet. I found myself in the vieux port of New Orleans, where it rains constantly and shrimp turn up everywhere...

Here’s something I found about the waterworks of New Orleans:

Ironic; when asked ‘what is a dry wine,’ how are we to know if what’s in the bottle is truly a product of a dry conditions. Merlot as we always identified is dry, even to a point of creamy. Often times it is gushing and oozing with exotic fruit. The key is to have a sense of place for your wine and the culture that surrounds the vines. In Gascogny, people are keen to distill information, live from the land and sea and enjoy the sun’s bounty. Not a dissimilar culture here in New Orleans!