The only reason I’m angry about this bottle—aside from the price—is how many respected reviews it’s received. It’s like when you buy a quality garment from a reputable house and it splits at the seams on first wear.
LVP pretends to produce wines that are much better than they really are. Or so I think. Drink them back to back with half a dozen other BC wines and I think you’ll see my point. They make OK wines gussied up a bit with facsimiles of hand-crafted labels including tech specs in script and, for better or worse, a price tag that puts them in the upper echelon of the local crop.
Witness this Rhone blend which is sharp, minerally, lightly herbacious and a touch acid. It’s spectacularly aperitif friendly but not terribly memorable or evocative and has nothing that we were anticipating (orange blossoms, honeyed fruit, etc.). I would like to witness some con-no-sirs blind taste this and see if it scored so high against the real McCoy. (I mean one review described it as having a note of “baked brioche” of all things; it’s that sort of crap that drives people to Yellow Tail.) Oh, and 14 point effing three per cent alcohol: That’s patently anti-French!
Price: A preposterous $35 from the vineyard. Pete’s in Seattle recently sold a Wine Advocate 93 pointer from the actual Rhone valley for $18.69 a bottle. Now that’s something to write a review about.
Market Liquidity: Impressive, not.
One response to “Le Vieux Pin Viognier-Roussanne, 2009”
[…] in the bottle than you might imagine. It rubs me as precious and then, sometimes, preposterous. We wrote here, in 2012, that LVP “pretends to produce wines that are much better than they really are.” This […]