When you hang around wine drinkers, anecdotes are in all conversations. After a few glasses, some stories become your stories and you only want to share them around. You remember the shape of a bottle, a specific talk with a producer and particular emotions that arose when what you had smell and what you had tasted were revealing the unexpected balance and harmony.
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Following up this visit at the French wine review fair, I am pouring myself a glass of my forever favourite red (Fleurie, 2005 – Domaine Monrozier) to tell you all about my first Sunday crush. I may have left the place with a spinning mind but I do remember the best, as the best always remains.

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Welcome to a world of Passion and Emotion!

If you think of a place where you had an admirable wine, it is usually because of a particular instant and boundary that you have created with what was around at this very moment.

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I felt quite lost when I entered the main hall and looked around bemused for a minute before I saw a very stylish blond gentleman standing proudly next to Château Preuillac. It was Jean-Christophe MAU, creator of flavours in Pessac-Léognan who instantaneously introduced me to his wines. After a very promising Château Preuillac 2001, that is when Jean-Christophe started to tell me the story of its Emotion de Preuillac, vintage 2005 that he got all my attention. A wine made with the best fields and selected grapes of his lands in Medoc – 1200 bottles – 1/100 of the property. More than the precious taste, that is what Mr. Mau said about it that struck me. I was asking him why he called his vintage Emotion: no need to work in communication to find it sounds very marketing… but when marketing manages to touch reality, the wine as a product of passion and the wine as the product of consumption can meet and achieve great things. Jean-Christophe said: « I called my wine Emotion because of the emotion I feel when I drink it. » I expected it to be more specific but, as simple as it can sound, I understood it personally and pictured myself coming back home after a few months, sitting on the terrace and tasting the first sip of my wine: emotion. Passionate wine makers all have this in common, whether they talk it through or whether it is printed on their face, emotion is the vector of their good wine and its memory. Passion also makes you dare taking risks which is primordial as « When you take no risks, you run the risk of making wines devoid of all ambition ». For that reason, Emotion and Passion should be the stamp of quality. Quality is certainly in this complex, fruity and rich wine, made with ambition, style, creativity and tradition: basics for a good wine to be.