Chateau des Jacques Moulin-a-Vent Clos du Grand Carquelin 2012
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Winemaker Notes
This wine will perfectly match red meats in sauce, game and most cheeses.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
This powerful, single-vineyard wine is both fruity and structured. Dense tannins and dark cherry fruits are beautifully balanced with the wood aging. Wait to drink this wine until 2017.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Moulin-a-Vent Clos du Grand Carquelin comes from granite and quartz soils and sees 10 months in new Alliers oak barrel. Here, the wood is quite dominant at the moment, lending it a very seductive sheen, although it needs to express its terroir with more clarity. The palate is medium-bodied with silky smooth tannins and well-judged acidity. There is plenty of velvety black fruit here, almost sumptuous toward the finish that is very well-balanced. Give this Moulin-a-Vent 3 to 4 years in bottle. Drink 2017-2025.
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Wine Spectator
Hints of mesquite smoke and bacon fat add a savory edge to the notes of crushed red currant and plum sauce, accented by touches of herbes de Provence and mocha. Well-knit, with supple tannins lending some grip to the lightly chewy finish. Drink now through 2020
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Delightfully playful, but also capable of impressive gravitas, Gamay is responsible for juicy, berry-packed wines. From Beaujolais, Gamay generally has three classes: Beaujolais Nouveau, a decidedly young, fruit-driven wine, Beaujolais Villages and Cru Beaujolais. The Villages and Crus are highly ranked grape growing communes whose wines are capable of improving with age whereas Nouveau, released two months after harvest, is intended for immediate consumption. Somm Secret—The ten different Crus have their own distinct personalities—Fleurie is delicate and floral, Côte de Brouilly is concentrated and elegant and Morgon is structured and age-worthy.
The bucolic region often identified as the southern part of Burgundy, Beaujolais actually doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the rest of the region in terms of climate, soil types and grape varieties. Beaujolais achieves its own identity with variations on style of one grape, Gamay.
Gamay was actually grown throughout all of Burgundy until 1395 when the Duke of Burgundy banished it south, making room for Pinot Noir to inhabit all of the “superior” hillsides of Burgundy proper. This was good news for Gamay as it produces a much better wine in the granitic soils of Beaujolais, compared with the limestone escarpments of the Côte d’Or.
Four styles of Beaujolais wines exist. The simplest, and one that has regrettably given the region a subpar reputation, is Beaujolais Nouveau. This is the Beaujolais wine that is made using carbonic maceration (a quick fermentation that results in sweet aromas) and is released on the third Thursday of November in the same year as harvest. It's meant to drink young and is flirty, fruity and fun. The rest of Beaujolais is where the serious wines are found. Aside from the wines simply labelled, Beaujolais, there are the Beaujolais-Villages wines, which must come from the hilly northern part of the region, and offer reasonable values with some gems among them. The superior sections are the cru vineyards coming from ten distinct communes: St-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Regnié, Brouilly, and Côte de Brouilly. Any cru Beajolais will have its commune name prominent on the label.