Les Genoux 2021
- Retail
- £50.00
- Member
- £40.00
- Case
- £300.00
- Case (Member)
- £240.00
- Varieties
- Grenache Noir, Carignan, Grenache Gris, Grenache Blanc
- Vintage
- 2021
- Country
- France
- Region
- Roussillon
- Alcohol
- 13.5%
- Bottle Size
- 750ml
- Drinking Window
- 2023 - 2032
- Description
- *This is our rare, single-vineyard wine, which is only produced in the best years. This year, only 665 bottles were made.
- Eyes
- Les Genoux is less intensely coloured than the regular cuveé, as it contains 10-15% white and pink grapes.
- Nose
- This year's Les Genoux is a bigger, riper style than the last couple of vintages, but still only clocks in at just over 13.5%. It is incredibly enticing, and the whole-bunch component adds freshness and a peppery bite to a core of extremely expressive wild strawberry and sweet liquorice fennel.
- Mouth
- Quite a punchy front palate with plenty of red fruits like strawberries and red fruit pastilles. There are gentle oak-derived vanillas, and subtle barrel seasoning accompanied by a rich, ripe, yet elegant Grenache palate picking up the wild strawberry theme and adding notes of orange peel, rosemary and fennel. A richer Les Genoux, but with a bright and persistent finish, and finely grained tannins.
- Body
- medium
- Winemaking notes
- The source of the fruit for our 'Les Genoux' cuveé are the wonderful 100+ year-old vines in our ancient Coume de Roy vineyard. All the grapes are picked by hand, and any selection needed to eliminate less than perfect grapes is done in the vineyard. This year we ended up with three demi-muids (500 L barrels) up-ended with the ends taken out. Two of them were filled with whole bunches, crushed under-foot, and plunged gently by hand, twice or three times a day, during the fermentation. At pressing, the wine was drained into one 500L Seguin Moreau 'Icone' barrel, and the pressings blended with other Grenache pressings in another 225L barrel. After 15 months of ageing, we bottled our 500L barrel as 'Les Genoux', returning our pressings barrel to the main Domaine of the Bee blend.
- Growing Conditions
- An EXTREMELY cold January, with rare snow lying on the ground (briefly) marked the start of a year that was incredibly dry. Very low rainfall in a cool spring, and then a nice mini heatwave in June, but still very little rain. Two more heat spikes in mid July and late August, followed by September rains which finally allowed the vines a little moisture, and helped to swell the thick-skinned grapes. Most of the vineyards for our white and rosé were harvested before the rain, and most of our reds in a dry spell after the rainy spells. A good year for white and pinks, and a GREAT year for reds.
Reviews
Tamlyn Currin on www.jancisrobinson.com
https://jancisrobinson.comDecember 19, 2024
I'm not a fan of wax capsules, but the blissfully thin beeswax that Justin Howard-Sneyd uses is something I can live with. Genoux is a wine that needs a little bit of time, and I think it's probably about two to three years too early to open this. But give it a bit of air, leave it alone in a large glass for half an hour, come back to it, and you'll find that the 2021 – while still tight, coiled, feeling as if it wants to be somewhere dark and underground – is very much what we've come to expect of Genoux. The tannins have this beautiful texture that's exactly like fine, fine rock dust on thick rose petals. It tastes like rosehips and hibiscus petals steeped in tea. It starts spicy and winter-earth, rosemary-twig savoury, putting up pleachers to protect the fruit. But the fruit spills through, like rosy dawn through an old laid hedge. Stones and after-the-storm minerality in the pauses of the finish. Hauntingly elegant, but very true to Maury. This will be (already is, but please don't open it now) another great beauty. 17++/20 (TC)