2006 Cassis Blanc Clos Sainte Magdeleine

I picked this up at K&L for around 22$ on the recommendation of one of the women that works there. It's always interesting to have someone with a different palate recommend some things to you. Anyways, everything that she recommended from that trip has been spot on, including this wine. This is a Kermit Lynch wine, so it's not like it's really off the wall or anything. Pretty much anything that he imports is good, at least in my experience.

Cassis is a town in Southeastern France, just a little East of Marseille--so Provence. This wine has a lot of Marsanne in it, which is the main white grape in Hermitage in the Northern Rhone. This wine is different in a good way. The nose is all green apples, pine (Sarah's suggestion...), and white flowers. Once it's in the mouth, you get some apple, honey, and as beguiling as it sounds, a saline quality. At first I was going to write the whole saline thing off as minerals, because it was something that was a little different and I couldn't place my finger on what was different about it. Salt is a mineral...but this was a different sensation than the whole "wet stone" thing. So I went to the internet, and in a real time example of someone influencing what I was thinking about what I was drinking, I came across a review of this wine, where the guy (Jacques Moreira) points out that the wine is actually salty, which made total sense. The wine is lush, rich and has tons of texture and body along with nice acidity. Overall a really nice white, but maybe a little bit expensive. I daresay that you might get more bang for your buck with a Riesling...but this is a much different animal. B/B+