The Problem With Puzelat

The problem with Thierry Puzelat's wines is that once you've tasted them, everything else seems calculated. Les poured some "Le Telquel" the other night, and it was simply wild: Wild berries and some kind of musky, green character on the nose that evokes the untended grassy fields of my youth--former farmland, turning back to grassland while waiting for the developer's backhoes and front-loaders to invade so that even more split-level ranches might be erected to house refugees from Queens and Brooklyn, yearning for their very own lawns.

Anyway, the wine was cloudy and tasted of red raspberry at the front of the tongue and fresh strawberry at the back. As explained by David McDuff, Puzelat's treatment of the gamay grape, while rigorously natural, did not fit in the INAO's frame of what Touraine gamay should be like. Hence, it is "vin de table" and has no vintage information. (Unlike David, neither Les nor I could find a code on the label.)

Which I suppose gets back to my original point: Puzelat's wines are literally too wild for the INAO, and they make most other wines seem housebroken. Maybe that's why the dog is wagging his tail?