Domaine de la Tournelle
Ploussard de Montellier
2004
12.5% alc.
Arbois, France
Oh, Jura Jura Jura—what will it take for the world to appreciate your wines? The Jura is a prosaic frontier region nestled in France near the southwest border of Switzerland. It is picturesque with fruit orchards and pastures for animal grazing. You’d never really know the place unless you were a devotee of wine. No other real reason to go there. But it produces some of the most interesting and stylish wines in France, and for the quality at comparatively reasonable prices. Remarkably, even in New York, people tend to ignore these wines. I sometimes eat late at a popular downtown brasserie with a broad wine list, almost exclusively French, including two to four wines from the Jura. A waiter told me that, aside from some French tourists and the odd local customer, I was the only one he knew who actually ordered them.
The poulsard (or ploussard) from Dom. de la Tournelle is a wonderful, inexpensive pinot noir-like wine that’s quite versatile at the table. Poulsard is a large, thin-skinned grape and a specialty of the Jura. It’s grown on about 800 acres of clay and limestone at elevations slightly higher than those of the Côte d’Or. It is grown nowhere else, except Bugey, France. It produces typically an aromatic, light-colored, pale red wine. Dom. de la Tournelle’s Pascal and Evelyn Clairet, who founded the winery in 1991, grow poulsard in an eco-friendly manner on 15 acres of land. They hand-harvest the grapes, macerate them for at least a week, subject the juice to malolactic fermentation, bottle the wine without filtration or sulphur and mature it in large oak barrels for 8 to 18 months. The 2007 poulsard has a pale-salmon color flecked with copper. There were aromas of leaves, moss, earth, juniper and red fruits. This is a lean, harmonious wine with bright acidity, mildly gripping tannins, medium body and alcohol. There were lightly concentrated rear-palate flavors of tea, orange and juniper. I had this with unadorned baked bluefish and white carrots roasted in duck fat with Forelle pears. 1/27/10.
