Château de Coulaine: Tasting & Drinking

Château de Coulaine is a domaine where, if you ask five wine critics what they think of it and its wines, you are quite likely to get seven different answers. The wines are certainly not subject to universal praise, and indeed I have at times found them to be quite divisive. Certainly not as divisive as the wines of Nicolas Joly, for example, but the wines of this estate do tend to stimulate similar levels of discussion in some quarters, and generate similarly diverse opinions. As it happens, for similar reasons.

On the one hand we have in the wines of Château de Coulaine some remarkably pure, bright, lifted flavours. Looking specifically at the red wines, the colours are dark and rich, and yet the concentration that follows is never too fat or leaden, instead it comes as a very pure, defined, vinous concentration, with lovely purity of fruit, well-defined, with pencil-drawn lines and fine, dry but ripe tannins. The style is distinctive, perhaps not entirely typical of the appellation (not every bottle, anyway), and at times it calls to mind the sort of pure-fruit vibrancy you might expect to encounter at a natural wine fair. In short, they can be delicious.

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