Drinking Tonight - 2012 Château le Puy

There has been some writing about this estate lately, but I haven´t tasted anything from them up to this point. The state monopoly had this vintage so I bought a couple of bottles. Time to test drive one.

2012 Château le Puy Emilien
A upfront, medium bodied nose with a large dose of barnyard, and not the kind where you see horses and oxen in front of you, but chickens instead. Even with a couple of hours in a decanter that aroma still dominate. But there are more, some red currants, cigarette ashes, road dust and a hint of saw dust also flows up from the glass. Interesting yes, good quality yes, but to my liking? No.
The taste is young, linear and tight with light red fruits in the shape of lingonberries and red currants with some additional notes of dusty earth, bakelite and dark, dark chocolate. Both the tannins and the acidity is very high and it ends on a bitter note.
Pure yes, ascetic yes, minimalistic yes, but where is the joie de vivre? Not in this bottle anyway. Given this blind, I´m not sure I have placed this in Bordeaux. A decent bottle of wine, but not my cup of tea. Would love to taste some old vintages, apparently the first vintage of the Emilien was 1917, I´m pretty sure they made wine more to my liking then... I will bury the rest of the bottles in the cellar and forget about them, maybe the not so attractive duckling will transform itself to a swan, given time.
82p   (tasted 2015/12)